Defining our Terms

Joy defines
the metaphor of truth
tromping down a path of winning
over evil.

Joy is my heart in love.
Joy is my soul in song.
Joy is my mind freed.
Joy is me in love.

Met

I first met Albert Swift
crying on the side of the street,
where he knelt, tearing at what
he held in his shallow palm,
for what he had done
in the sticky darkness of midnight.
But it was not him
who had grasped that
white
throat
I knew, I, I knew it was not him.

Cutting My Hair

After the first few cuts
I stole a look in the handheld mirror
and saw the Unibomber staring back
saw a mad face, shocked rags of brown
clumps, a shredded styling

where before there was a hippie
now an asylum escapee
but snip snip we went
keeping my head down
until the electrics kicked in

after the last few buzzes
I posed for a picture
and wondered about Samson
who lost his strength when he was seduced by Delilah
and post-coitus had his shave

here was me, and my friend
snapping a photo in the front yard
sweeping the clumps into a bag,
I'd seduced myself to the scissors,
and I went inside to wash.

Playing with Air

Undone and redone
Re-run, de-run, un-run
son sun of a gon' gun,

creeks, cricks, crickets, critics
mix affixes and clitics
in the sense strictest

depend and defend
lean loan lent leaned lend
trean, trent, trend

trip trap troop, drip drop droop
trop drap trape

wotch at far dongerous folling racks

how would you pronounce eckshmplodth?
-Monday, January Fourteenth, 2008

Joy in Learning

I want to return to this idea of joyful learning and to dispel misunderstandings - like shadows from the corners, or abandoned spiderwebs in forgotten cellars.

Joy in the classroom is not smiles, although those are excellent symptoms of joy. Having fun is an important part of joy: a day of class that has no jokes, stories, or mischief is a sad day. Exam days are like this - and they should be done away because assessment should not mean tying students to a chair and flogging out how much they know. Fun is important, not the core of joy.

The foundation (an old metaphor that says IDEAS ARE BUILDINGS) of joy in learning, as I see it, is a far more serious thing. It relates to what joy is in everyday life. In everyday life, joy requires three attitudes:

1. That Life, as opposed to non-life is worth it. Living is worth the ache, the "slings and arrows."
2. The present is more important than the past or future. The present is where we live.
3. Creating balance between your soul and the outside world is mandatory. Another way of saying this is contentment with what you have and what you are, even as you improve your world and yourself. You can want more, or less; joy, however, does not depend on what you have or are, but on the relationship that you create between the what you have and what you want.. Another way of saying this how the Rolling Stones put it: "You can't always get what you want, but...you get what you need." Another way is what C. S. N. & Y. sang, "If you can't be with the X you love, love the X you're with."
This maps quite nicely onto learning with joy:

1. Joyous learning takes hard work.

2. Joyous learning happens right now.

3. Joyous learning is about responding to yourself, not adding to/fixing/correcting yourself.

Its important to realize that teachers create or destroy an environment for joy; they don't create/destroy it directly for their students. Some people refuse joy even when it is there for the taking; others relish it despite the void in which they learn.

Joy is the satisfaction of solving a hard problem, discovering something new, writing a really good sentence, building a solid house, turning over the key on an engine you rebuilt yourself and listening to those turbos wind up.

Joy is also defiance in the face of failure, what others have called dignity in defeat.

When Job had everything, he continually said "Blessed be the name of the Lord," and when he lost everything, he said "Blessed be the name of the Lord." Having the same, optimistic and life-embracing response to every situation is what joy is about.

Joy is how we choose to live, not merely react to stimulus. It can be that way in the classroom too, given encouragement and room.

Redemption:

what words and suffering cannot accomplish:
40 years,
desert baking,
pressure hardening:
a heart set to trickle charge;

and then at once the flashing moment:
the small motions of a woman's left hand
inciting sudden involvement in truly human matters,
in the one heroic act of a life:

not that children were conceived or reared but sufficient that love was made,
not that a sword was ever raised but enough, oh my heart, that it was unsheathed.

All You Need.

Listening to the Beatles classic "All You Need Is Love" again, since its Vday, I'm struck not by the dropping, easy/lazy vocals, or the slightly circus organ rythym (especially as it breaks into the outro, recalling the lyrics to their earlier hit with its "Love you...yeah yeah yeah") of the trumpets; no, what I'm most in tune with is the violins. After the first chorus, there is a moment where the wittle down the essence of the melody to a bare draw, a perfect squiggle in time. And a minute later the tempo opens up and we get the circus act.

Is that like love? The Take it Easy slow build, the moment of truth, and then the fun drops from the sky and the party begins and carries you into forever.

Clearance

A little cliff beside the sea, full of spiked waves dropping, is the focal point at the length from then to now, a distance of years, and from there to here, between seas and nations, and from me to her, the space in which we breathe and sleep.

And never back to that little cliff can the clearance be crossed or the direction be determined.

Yet hope renews itself and is bright each morning for the blue and indigo midnight-wedding of our earnest youth; though what is lost is dear (that moment itself of love blending into love) the future we bought and the present glories we gained are worthy enough.

Let us say that this, too, is love.

-Monday, January Eighth, 2007

The Disembody

Ay won'ever unforget
The darkly even ning
Whin throo the brash we proshed
und came up awn the disembody
floeting owt a cross the crack
und noo the whurled wus changd

Knowing without knowing

My soul is that bit
back
from
above
behind
below
central
inside
mapped
blended
that bit that can't be measured
but for what I know of it,
knowing without knowing

Differences in Hearts

When I was young I had a strong heart and the affections
it pumped were thick sheets of rain
or hail driven at sloped angles across the sky;
like clouds all clustered together so that
a few square miles are a hurricane-on-land as pounds
of ice are flying with a crushing determinism
down in the valley.

Then it was all tears and cries and wails and rage,
or a cosmic experiment in suffering,
or an endurance test for the human, my very own, soul.

Now my heart is full grown and hungry,
unbounded into itself and what my soul demands,
answering with quiet, fireside words
that do not inflame
but smolder and smile and still the embers
into a fine orange and pink
to last us until the morning comes.

The difference, I think, is love.

-Saturday, December Thirtieth, 2006

Without

untended, unminded
we crept through woods
on hands and knees
unsafe, unsure

the best nights are spent
out and without
adult supervision

An Oven Timer Beeping

The world is static charged, windy, wild, forlorn and mired, enlarged in theory but shrunk in motive force.

The world is tipped in orbit, spanned, spun, backwards run, uneven to God yet quite level to us.

The world is an oven timer, a Christmas light, a chipped knife, a leaky bucket, a stuck trapdoor, a rotting floor, a coaster stuck to the bottom of a glass.

The world is an old tree stump, a road bump, a Coke and Rum.
The world is a waiting room patient whose time has come.

-Saturday, December Twenty-third, 2006

Nothing Secret

On the last Friday, while writing paragraphs on the topic "(An/The most) important person in my life", one of my students asked for spelling confirmation on the word 'secret'.

I teach English as Second Language, mostly writing and grammar, to fourteen students at Richland Community College in Dallas, Texas. One of my goals in teaching is to share joy. This can be accomplished in many ways: by having lots of parties, by celebrating each other and each other's culture, by telling jokes, and by doing most of the boring work in groups. My mantra in this is something that my teacher, Haj Ross, said to me. He was explaining his take on the above ideas when he said that "it's easier to learn with friends." This may seem to be a simple or obvious point, or a silly one, but it really is quite foundational to co-creating a classroom that has joy in it.

I don't know if "It's easier to learn with friends" is Haj's mantra; I suspect that for him it is merely an everyday truth that needs no trumpet - something he said once and may say again, but bares no sacred meaning. I want to (trumpet/*saxophone/*trombone) it here.


Creating and Sharing Joy with your Students in the Classroom:
I. Teaching is easier when learning is easier.
II. Learning is easier with friends.
III. Joy in the classroom is derived from the success of friendship, not the success of the individual.


So what does this all have to do with writing paragraphs on something as deadening boring as "The most important person in my life" or the word 'secret'? The sentence that my student discovered, that she needed to make sure was spelled right, was this:

There is nothing secret between her and me.

The 'her and me' refers to my student and her mother, who was the most important person in her life. What amazed me was that I had given her such a lame prompt and drew up out of English, her second language, such an amazing sentence.

Initially, I read the sentence, confirmed her spelling, and moved on. As I circulated the room, helping students with this and that, little problems, the phrase was inside my mouth. Up and down my throat, behind my teeth, slavering across my tongue.

There is nothing secret between her and me. What brilliance of language, my own language in the mouth of a learner. We don't know how people learn their first language, we don't really know how they learn a second language. But here was this newbie flashing forth with a bit of my domain and it struck me a mighty blow.


So I wrote it on the board and together we explored some ways the thought might unfold:

1a. There is nothing secret between her and me.
1b. There is nothing secret between me and her.
1c. There is nothing secret between us.

2a. Nothing is secret between her and me.
2b. Nothing is secret between me and her.
2c. Nothing is secret between us.

3a. Between her and me, nothing is secret.
3b. Between me and her, nothing is secret.
3c. Between us, nothing is secret.

4a. Between her and me, there is nothing secret.
4b. Between me and her, there is nothing is secret.
4c. Between us, there is nothing secret.

Between a and b of every subset, the difference seems to be primarily in focus; c, however, collapses the difference of 'her' and 'me' and seems much better. The point of the sentence, after all, is to demonstrate the smallness of the gap between two humans, using a plural pronoun categorizes them much closer than two singular ones do.

I particularly like the sets in 1 and 4 with the phrase 'there is nothing secret' rather than 2 and 3's 'nothing is secret'. While they both seem to say the same thing, I think 'there is' emphasizes that a relationship exists and the sentence is therefore categorizing the relationship. 2 and 3 both seem to offer mere negation.

For instance, I could say "Nothing is secret between me and Genghis Khan" because there is nothing at all, secret or otherwise, between us. I could also say "Nothing is special..." or "Nothing is..."

To say "There is nothing secret..." feels much more like a positive statement of the kind of relationship, rather than just negating secrets.


I'm not entirely sure the students knew how important this all was to me. We talked about the focus issues between a, b, and c; I explained my preference for 1c and 4c as above. The reason I submit this to the outside world is that this sort of honest exploration makes for much better learning, I think, than the exercises one finds in a book. There is joy and authenticity in it; even when there is failure, I feel as though we weren't drinking from the drip bottle but from a wild stream. And that is certainly a better gulp.

One important factor to note: you have to make yourself open to these sort of experiences ( events, happenings, occurrences, rabbit trails, tangents, vectors, ect.) for it to be authentic. If I had planned a few sentences the week before to try this with, I think it would have been far less joyful - unless my sentences happened to spark someone else's fire. The point is that you can't force it.

Another mantra, one I learned from my teacher Dr. Armstrong, at Stephen F. Austin State, goes thus:

Teach to the Teachable Moment.

Some Nights Are and Some Nights Aren't

A dark room, windowless and howling
eating alive each damned soul
who abandoned hope, who forsook the Word of God, and who took for granted the luminous shadow of cracking, misplaced love

This too is love.

And best of all, the worse has passed
and all ahead is green and good
and eyelids fall, and mouths close fast
to each own bed each sleeper would

- Wednesday, December Twentieth, 2006

Bull Elephants

We didn't know what to do with bull elephants, but here was this crazy barbarian, hands dusted white, telling us to sidle up from the back and from the left, until we could touch the cold skin of his flank. Just approach, he said, and get a feel for him. Try to notice the way he moves. As if something so massive had anything to offer but bulk and grandeur. There was nothing cached or hidden in his eyes, no small wonders in the crevices. Nothing secret to be shared between us - awe and mystery, but impenetrable.

Of course, back in the camp we had seen many of these creatures, shot between the eyes and carved. Laid out in neat blocks on the table for the anatomist, the vivisectionist. Here an eye, labeled an eye; there a tusk, labeled a tusk. Tail, intestine, stomach, heart, liver, kidneys, lung left, lung right, cranium, skull cap, trunk sections, ears, feet, paws, tanned hide, teeth arranged in rows, spinal vertebrae, womb in one jar, phallus in another. Tidy Latin text on little sticky notes detailing the whole structure of an elephant.

The Scientists were perfect. Dispassionate, rigorous. Not just with the anatomy, but everything. Everything you ever wanted to know about elephants but didn't want to ask. A book of answers on every shelf. Grant money poured into whitewashed little huts with gasoline generators. Perfect.

We Tourists, we Safarists, we trembling explorers with six pairs of socks in ziplock bags, we watched the whole process of bull elephant disassembly with an appropriate mix of shock and appreciation. Look, dear! Look how he handles the knife, knows just where to cut. I wonder where he learned to do that. For we Tourists, the Scientists too were beyond our ken. Alien. Gods. Themselves impenetrable.

The Natives had little opinion in the matter. Elephantry was outside the scope of their survival, their everyday, their life, their ontology. The Scientists held magic to net and kill and dissect the monsters in the jungle - the Scientists were sorcerers and could do as they please; the Natives had no interest in letting the expedition intersect their lives.

So we Tourists and the Natives were not so different - except that the Natives didn't understand elephants and didn't want to; while we pretended to understand the Science that explained the elephants. But it was a lie. We didn't understand the Science or the elephants or even the Scientists themselves. Awe and mystery, impenetrable.

But here we were, tourists, now outside the camp and in that jungle with the monsters; and here was this madman, our guide, neither scientist nor native, showing us elephants directly. The scientists only came out to watch or capture, never approached the animals. Detect, observe, note, net, shoot, carve, label. But our friend the barbarian loved them. He watched and noticed without notepad, without recorder, without malice. He wanted elephants dangerous and in the wild, not pinned down and safe. And now it was my turn to sidle up and run my fingers along the biggest living thing I have ever touched. I approached, unsure. A little drunk (in my fear I had nipped at a bottle), I heard every crack and crunkle of twig and leaf beneath my boots.

Two yards. The madman behind me whispering, go on go on, it's no use living if you never touch life. This is big life, this is abundant life.

One yard. I think of how much blood must be running through those veins; veins the size of garden hoses. The toes are huge. All I can see is the toes. The little cracks in the toes. And I'm there, reaching out beyond my center of gravity so that I don't have to step closer; just get one little touch and I can be done with this and go back to the camp.

And he moves away, leaving my fingers brushing air. The mass of him just shifts and he takes a step. He's really not heavy on his feet but he's so big it seems like the earth is moving. I think of Moses' ten spies, terrified. There are giants in the land.

The world, the giant, takes another step away and I can't follow. Our insane guide grabs me by the shoulder, friendly, but white chalk from his hands clouds around my face and I try not to cough - still terrified of the size of the elephant.

Not the size. The impenetrability. That's really what I was afraid of, I think. It wasn't the possible injury or possible death or the strangeness of such a creature or really even my own ineptitude in dealing with it. I wasn't afraid of being the fool. There was just no approach to that sort a thing. I know now why the scientists had to shoot and carve to understand - it's easier to dissect than to love. But love is knowing life, dissection just shows us the bits after life.

My guide smiles at me, his own bulk showing through his sweater. Let's try a smaller one, he says, and leads our group to another herd. This one, he says, may look like a baby, but he has so much to offer - I've been making friends with him for years and I can't imagine how little I really know.

This time I go first, and though just as unsure and clumsy, I manage to touch it. Him. I feel that cold skin, and yes its cold - but with life underneath. Big Life, Life abundant. And this bull elephant, whose name is Digging, I myself have come back to again and again to notice and to make friends. To penetrate, not with bullets or scalpels or academia or dissertation proposals, but with love. Not to pierce the skin, but the heart of the thing.

Digging goes,

Between my finger and my thumb...

Retrieval

It never snows much these Decembers and
Driving without destinations has lost all appeal
Since the Christmas when everything dropped into
A place we can't fit through to retrieve
Ourselves and who we wanted to grow up to be.

But this too is love: retrieval.

- Monday, December Eighteenth, 2006

Gemma Hayes

I'd like to suggest listening (?deeply/?seriously/*strongly) to Gemma Hayes. She has a penetrating voice and sense of placement about herself that must be timed very closely with the human condition - her piece "Work to a Calm" is wrenching. It sets out the soul on edge like the grinding of gears does my teeth. The sound itself, however, is quite lovely.

Her album Night on My Side begins with the words "Oh good God, what has he done / traded a heart for a bullet and mind for a gun" and never fails to match the promise of tragedy and ache.

Gemma Hayes.

Cars

up for too long wasting who i am
windows closed, doors locked,
blankets folded, shutters pulled

everything is fine, everything is safe,
it’s kept tight little rooms in little towns

tiny thoughts that go racing down the street
in gray big blue cars moving faster than anything

up for so long talking about dreams the brain in this head
is sending all these messages:
when she steps out of something it is into something

stupid games to play
shoot and dodge, accuse and defend,
the punches pulled everything is wrong,

but it’s all safe, it’s kept up tight
in a big heart defined by blue eyes

dignities that go racing out in the cold
in white bonnevilles moving away from everything

up for way too long, all soaked thru
with the nighttime blue and plymouth gray
when i step up out of something it is in to nothing

Formulas

Each formula says the same as the last:
this one and that one will never quite match
but a difference in place, where e'er we cross
backwards in attitude to whatever we lost:
every cut left a scar to stand in contrast
to how this one and that one will never quite match.

- Sunday, December Seventeenth, 2006

Estate

a great afternoon for going gently into the good papers: where all the named but ignored quit quietly from the earth. a passing breath that, like all the others, had one before it unique for having none come after. and that is all. just exhalation and leave. no closing curtain, clash of thunder and drama, her last words simply asking for water some few hours before; and any after that go unrecorded.

a great old lady, but hardly grand. her sheets were bought last year and the bedside lamp had been in the house when she moved in. her iconography was all pans and pantries. a two-decade gone husband and a journalist son somewhere in the north of iran. he received notice one month later, but the property had already been settled, he had a few items waiting in storage, but there was certainly no need for him to come home. the grave plot had been arranged and paid for six years beforehand, it was just a few hundred yards from the new highway exchange but the sound of traffic hardly ever invaded; in fact most of the cemetery was quiet and pleasant.

a great mystery indeed. how can a face and a name and a sentence affect me? anyone may be given a backstory and meaning, any word rendered sacred by repeating it in the dark as thoughts of god and heaven and death and sex go parading about, shooting down the inner eye and old radio love songs from 9th grade are chiseling away at the berlin wall we have in our stomach, that keeps us from weeping for days at the barely noticeable death of a great old lady, who died with the same humility that let her slip thru our lives without ever recognizing humankind when we saw her at the grocery store,

loading her own milk into the back of a red mercury

Gold

There will come a year, sweet:
When the hammer is reversed, upwards swung
then your gold shall be pounded to iron

There will come a year, love:
When the loom is upturned, and backwards run
then all the gold to old straw will be spun

There will come a year, child:
When Earth, mortal, shall fall into the Sun
and then your locks of gold shall be undone

But, God, if I could now count and keep
the fistfuls of blue you hold in your eyes

If I could but count and keep...

The Still

So sip your lemonade and touch the straw
around its asymmetrical crack,
perfect falling in-between ice's flaw:

That the sun floats down the amber and black,
like steel-blue trains would if they came up off and lost the track,
but I swear the setting would stop until
you could sip in the quiet and the still
watching sunsets and ice thaw