I have written poems about my students, but interestingly not for the ones who died. Actually, the only two student deaths I can think of were suicides: the first a young woman who went upon into the local mountains and shot herself. She was at college, but had been in touch with me right up until the event. I, of course, lamented that I had not been convincing enough, but know that it doesn't really work that way. The other, a young man, jumped from a building, a method of death that still shocks me when I am brought to its recollection. But I produced no elegies. But in the case of the latter tragedy I did what for me sometimes is my outrageous penchant for blundering. I proceeded with the lesson I had planned for the day we all became aware of the news without realizing its inappropriateness. The lesson was a reading of littel Eva's death in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Talk about quicksand. Anyway, one of the poems I wrote about a student alludes to a sort of death, at least in my perception of her behavior at that distant moment. The student was one of the most brilliant I ever taught, but I felt she was misplacing her talents. In its own way, it is an elegy for a suicide It is entitled Christ's Child, and it goes like this:

It's rich, the way
You give yourself chastely,
In paeans to God.
The gestures of your hands and heart
Rise like flocks of birds
Toward Heaven:
They are the angels of your self
Climbing Jacob's ladder,
Up and down;
They wrestle with the world.

The scene you present
Is lent in Masaccio's gold:
Bright order flickers
From those strict braids
That swing like censers,
The enchanting earth in your eyes
Melts like superficial ice,
And the blatant sun
Is caught, then subdued
In the lotus white porcelain
Of your face.
You collect the day and offer it,
A broken branch you bear
Like Martini's messenger
Sent from God.

See how we, virgins to your faith,
Withdraw,
Aghast at the prospect
Of such suicide.

The Irrepressible Reflex

The day was bored.
The walls yawned their faintly
Antiseptic pale, green yawns.
And the eyelids on drooping heads
Were all clam-tight shut.
Even the mind yawned.

Every child set before
The fury of Tennyson's Guinevere,
The young artist's stinging hands,
Anna on the railroad track,
Even before Eve's delicious
Prelapsarian complexion
And Conrad's daarrrkkknnnesssss
Yawned such abysses
That the mouth of Polyphemus
Would seem to Odysseus
Alice's tiny door.

How I can unwind, unravel, unfold
Such a fantasy of carnival freaks,
Of gods, of men (poor man!)
As they parade their fat Falstaff
Bellies, their withering witcheries,
Their wickednesses, their fragrant
Rose-petal petticoats before me.

How they suffer the joys and agonies
Of life--in an impromptu yawn,
In a drowsy, indelicate, uncontrollable
Undermining, indefensible, unwarranted,
Insulting and indifferent yawn!

In the last two weeks, I have seen two former students who both said what I have heard so often before: you were the best teacher I ever had no matter where or what, college, graduate school, Harvard, Stanford, Sorbonne. Well, maybe not the last. I know it may seem that I lack humility and modesty or that I am prone to braggadocio or maybe that I suffer from emotional disturbances such as delusions of grandeur or just plain, simple, exasperatingly belligerent egocentrism. I think my wife would agree--maybe I should quote Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf: Martha says of her husband beating, you married me for it, and George responds, that's a desperately sick lie. Somewhere in between the two lies the truth. I bring it up because teachers, especially ones who connect to their students on a number of levels, end up having a profoundly deep emotional experience with them, something that for both teacher and student is akin to love. I think in my case it was that I had a passion for the material and for students, and they sensed and appreciated those passions, even sometimes fell in love with them, not in any romantic way, but in some sort of essentially human way, especially at a time when their humanity was just emerging and needed to hear truths and diverse points of view and needed to feel even more a total acceptance of them no matter what they said or did even. I think I may have in some way filled their human needs. That accounts for the messages I found to stir their souls with. As for the skills, I think I was able to help them to a place of effective and confident self-expression, and given the opportunity, it turned out they had a great deal to say and wanted to say it to someone who would be sympathetic. Well, in any case, it has been one of the great mysteries and at the same time great joys of my life. But where does that put me? As much as I have tried here to pin it down, what exactly is the position of a teacher? Even if we were to resort to words like mentor and hero and magician, they would not capture the emotional intensity of the connection between student and teacher that has meant something so powerful to both. I think Theodore Roethke's Elegy for Jane (My student, thrown by a horse) gets pretty close because it reveals the teacher’s appreciation and understanding and love turned to grief of and for his student Jane. In fact, it is apparent that he knows Jane better than her father, but of course he is not her father; and better than her lover, but of course he is not her lover. He is only her teacher and yet his love and his pain at her loss is as real and as deep as anyone's.

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,

A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.

My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.

If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.

I was trying to locate a poem anthologized in one of the textbooks from which I taught having to do with what animal heaven was like, only to come across a plethora of internet sites having to do with the argument whether or not animals actually go to the Christian heaven. It involves things such as the argument as to whether animals actually have souls. Then there is the use of biblical texts to show that they in fact do have souls and are blessed by whomever they need to be blessed by to get that special privilege. I tried to ascertain whether or not St. Augustine had said anything about the divine will. Despite my lack of success there, I am confident that he has uttered the last word on the matter and consequently, that, as they say, is that! I mean my Sadie and Sam--our newest cats--deserve whatever good can come to them, rewards should abound for their sweet, loving natures, salvation belongs to those who exude the aura of Christian charity they show. Which means, I guess, that our big old, semi-barbaric, bite-your-petting-hand-if-lingering-too-long-on-the-shank Max will have to go to Hell. God damn you, you pernicious and perfidious and pertinacious putty-tat. I am assuming that not all animals go to heaven, but I may be wrong on that issue. I need more time to research the matter. What exactly do the most prominent theologians say? And being a cat person as opposed to a dog person, I am thinking-hoping that because dogs chew rugs and bedding and shoes and insist too much on extended bouncy-ball time that they are prime prospects for the eternal flames of perdition too. I have a list of other creatures whose less than angelic characteristics make them targets for eternal arrows. I cut one in half today as it marched toward the succulent new growth on one my most precious pinus mugos. But eventually I did unearth the sought-for poem, its turning out to have been written by that crazy poet character James Dickey (I say a crazy poet character because he wrote a poem about a sheep-child, can you imagine? [if you know what I mean]). Here is his The Heaven of Animals:

Here they are. The soft eyes open.
If they have lived in a wood
It is a wood.
If they have lived on plains
It is grass rolling
Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,
Anyway, beyond their knowing.
Their instincts wholly bloom
And they rise.
The soft eyes open

To match them, the landscape flowers,
Outdoing, desperately
Outdoing what is required:
Thru richest wood,
The deepest field.

For some of these,
It could not be the place
It is, without blood.
These hunt, as they have done
But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.
They stalk more silently,
And crouch on the limbs of trees,
And their descent
Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years
In a sovereign floating of joy.
And those that are hunted
Know this as their life,
Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge
Of what is in glory above them,
And to feel no fear,
But acceptance, compliance.
Fulfilling themselves without pain.

At the cycles center,
They tremble, they walk
Under the tree,
They fall, they are torn,
They rise, they walk again.

How cool is that? Though I get the feeling that Heaven is just a little prejudiced in favor of the killer. Maybe Max is really a saint in disguise come to test my faith. I'll have to pay him more homage in the future and include him in my prayers at night.

Animals, like horses, are good fodder for poetry because they engage our imaginations in and of themselves, so the poet is half way there in his journey toward a capturing of his audience. I have used them for their instinctive brutality, their simple, but beautiful violence as in this poem of mine about a shrike. To inform the poem, I am offering Wikipedia's concise description of the bird: A shrike is a passerine bird of the family Laniidae which is known for its habit of catching insects, small birds or mammals and impaling their bodies on thorns. This helps them to tear the flesh into smaller, more conveniently-sized fragments, and serves as a "larder" so that the shrike can return to the uneaten portions at a later time. A typical shrike's beak is hooked, like that of a bird of prey, reflecting its predatory nature. Most shrike species occur in Eurasia and Africa, but two breed in North America (the Loggerhead and Great Grey shrikes). There are no members of this family in South America or Australia. Some shrikes are also known as "butcher birds" because of their habit of keeping corpses. Australasian butcherbirds are not shrikes, although they occupy a similar ecological niche. Several African species are known as fiscals, derived from the Afrikaans term for the hangman, fiskaal.

Here is my attempt to capture the essence of shrike, maybe even the essence of animal, maybe even of man as murderer:

Dark, dull bird, grayed inside and out,
You shriek barbs to hang the sweaty frog,
Applaud him limp to the last
Electric twitch of the long thigh
Before dismemberment.

The wind pictured you deserted,
But yet decisive against the hot sun;
Then with catlike skill you struck the air,
Putting on the panther's sleek
Slide with head hung
And shoulders reared.

You spun mid-arc;
Your bandit eye pinned the clumsy
Speck that hopped haphazardly,
That studied crouching weeds from side to side
With every haul and gathering of leg.
It was with such smooth grace
That you fell out of air and
Stabbed him in the dirt.

Wings stretched and wings curled and
Wings quivered with hydraulic friction.
Your muscles would not stop.
You wrenched the spasmic bull
Upon the fence to pop the leather skin.
Your swollen, ruffled breast
Responded blood for blood.

I taught for two years in Bedford County, VA. Horse country. Once when I went to the house of a six grader's of mine to pick up a quarter of a deer, a gift, I came upon the birthing of a colt, a startling sight! What I remember most was the grunting and the way the prone mare's four legs raised and stood stiffly for a minute out to the side as she apparently had a contraction. I remember too the nearness to the event. The boy came down to meet me and commented that she had to be watched in case complications arose. I took my deer and left as soon as possible. As a teacher and therefore a sort of member of the community, my wife and I were also once invited to a Kentucky Derby party. Despite efforts to include us, we evidently didn't really fit in; besides, it was a grotesque mockery of the real thing--or was this the real thing too. I hoped not. The only one we really knew there was the doctor who had invited us. He rode his horse to church and to this party. Six months later, he shot himself. Anyway, hors d'oeuvres were served and women wore large hats and men drank Jim Beam and Southern Comfort and bets were bet. Then at the appointed time, we all gathered around the TV for the race. We left promptly thereafter (it does appear that I am always absconding from any given scene). All of this has been brought to mind, including the horses the rich judge's daughter bought for the commune when we joined it with our two kids--god only knows what happened to those poor beasts--and stories of my wife's childhood summers on her grandparents' farm where she and the cousins got into trouble riding the work horses, all of this has come to mind because of the death of Eight Belles and because I have been remembering too James Wright's poem about his and Robert Bly's mystical moment with horses one evening on the side of the road. Frankly, horses scare the hell out of me. I guess the truth of the matter is that I don't trust them. But they are remarkably beautiful creatures and so there is that aesthetic thing. But a horse race is not about beauty; it's about money. And so as I understand it, it is acceptable as in most actions for money to do anything that needs to be done to make as much money as possible, which includes for the horse-racing industry apparently excessive inbreeding, racing immature horses, racing them on a course too long for their strength, and doping them. The result is a lot of dead horses. But maybe there are plenty to go around, and though a horse lurching about that then has to be euthanized immediately is an unfortunate circumstance, people want the spectacle and are willing to pay the big bucks to see it. Now I am remembering Vronsky's intense pain and bitter disappointment when his horse Frou Frou has to be put down because he made a wrong move that results in breaking her back. What a scene as she looks back at him with those large, pitiful, beseeching eyes. Maybe when we juxtapose James Wright's poem The Blessing against the reality of some horses' lives and deaths, the poet's portrayal of horses may come off as wanton sentimentalism. Nevertheless, I offer it here as a eulogy for Eight Belles:

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Someone once said the following: "There is nothing that can be said by mathematical symbols and relations which cannot also be said by words. The converse, however, is false. Much that can be and is said by words cannot successfully be put into equations, because it is nonsense." And we might add because much of it is untrue. I listened this morning to the NPR interview with Ms. Tillman, the mother of the young patriot Pat Tillman who was killed by friendly fire, rather than by enemy fire in the pursuit of heroic action, which the Army falsely demarcated by the awarding of the Silver Star posthumously and presented of course to the family. Well, this member of the family was not content with that rendition and as it turns out with the military's second rendition either, she assuming, I suppose, that if they lied once, they can just as easily lie twice and thrice and ad infinitum, and she was going to find out the truth if the truth could be found. To find the truth involved the kind of investigation that one would expect of the government when there is a shocking and outrageous cover up--which in our mathematical formula equals outrageous lie--but which in this case was left to the mother, who has written a book about her findings. And the truth is not a pretty sight: apparently the men were firing in a sort battle frenzy and as they admit themselves ignored the gestures of cease fire they saw from the men that they must have suspected could be their own. Ms. Tillman certainly has gotten closer to the truth, but only someone who was there and able to see the moment from all the geographical angles--physical and emotional--can really know the whole truth. But we must applaud the careful, investigative nature of this mother's search for the cause of her son's death, and for her shift of our perspective so that rather than getting what the government wanted--to rally sentiment for the war--what they got instead was further evidence that putting young men and women in these emotionally debilitating and enervating circumstances is morally wrong and utterly inhumane. Hemingway's entire moral compass as an artist, I mentioned recently, was to tell the absolute truth as completely as it is possible for any human being to know it, and he pursued that truth relentlessly in his works. Interestingly, much of his vision we know was forged in the fires of his own involvement in war, and a war's purpose which he knew was belied by the sentimental and mendacious claptrap milled by the military propagandists who cared not a jot for the sad young soldier slogging his way through mud and smoke and blood possibly to his own agonizing and protracted death. Here's Hemingway's notion of war and the pretty lies used to describe it: "I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice. . . . We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates." I agree. It is best to keep our focus on the precise and mathematical dimensions of things; once we get too far adrift in the emotional field, we can't seem to find our way back to the truth and sometimes don't even want to.