One Poem by Joshua Kreis McTiernan

The Class

for those herein described: "many thanks"

You can’t expect me to teach when
I’ve been reading Thanatopsis in the bath tub.

My mind flows to class where there’s
Cameron, with the afghan straight hair,
bones brittle, discarded twigs;
Maisaa, smile hung dutifully from the ears;
Angel, his roman-romantic curls,
drowsy with fourth period.

I finger Thanatopsis

and Bryant quietly approaches the lectern,
his chin wrapped in fingers, one straying
to the mouth to remind me that
the chemicals will unbalance,
ventricles will buckle, and
cells clump and clog, collapsing
exhausted,
one holding another. This is the best we can hope for.
And every parent, he says, still sees their men and women
through cradle-vision: doughy, squashed down to
tiny fingers and toes untried, untested,
unready.

The twigs we’ll bundle and bury
with few words. The smile will dangle, choke.
The curls will fall and energy
disappear. Not destroyed, merely
transferred.

Do they see in me
the look I bring to class, clutched close
like an ill-tempered child?
The cold bath water soaks
through my skin. I drip Thanatopsis.
I drain it.

No lecture. No assignment. I cannot teach
the dead to stay that way, nor the living
[and so bright: twigs and smile and curls]
to accept indescribable non-existence. In time
we get to that uneasy understanding
alone. We read it in shivers,
in blue lips after bath time,
in hair clumped heavy in defeat
and the little pulls from that perpetual gray Sunday
in Lincoln Park. I think,

‘What will I say to them then?
What will I say when they slouch through
the trail I expect to blaze,
their hair cropped closer perhaps,
wrinkles like fingers
cupping the sockets, age weary child born fat
or femur thin from some new-shaken-off disease?’
And will they be surprised to see that
once again we’ve been tossed together
with no lesson plan?

{Poem by Joshua Kreis McTiernan}