Another poem someone asked me to read.
This too in its way is about writing.
When I first started teaching, I had
a job at a small Catholic college in Oregon.
And I was the only person in the English department
who was teaching a night class.
When I walked into my first creative writing class,
there were a line of young women sitting in the first row who
didn't have that either ultra ultrasensitive or arrogant look
of a creative writing student.
They were kind of giggling and having a good time.
So I found out later on that they were all students
in the nursing school.
And they had to look at a body in trouble.
No, they were doing their residencies during the day.
And they had to take an English course.
And mine was the only one that met at night.
And out of a perverse sense, I assigned as a first assignment
in the course, I assigned to write
a poem about their own deaths putting aside
all religious convictions or whatever,
try to get right to the heart of it, right to the cadaver of it,
right?
This poem is about that.
Creative writing.
The heart is a violent muscle that opens and shuts.
The subject is death.
The subject is also laughter, the bravery
of girls, nine in a row.
In each face, a hole opens.
Nine tiny stars of nervousness spin languidly out.
Sweethearts, death is blind.
He'll run up and down your body's.
Death with a dog's face goes running
through the women's door.
He has neither breasts nor jewelry.
The counselors run in his shadow shouting, here,
we're all Christians here.
In the old country, everybody was Jewish.
Everybody had the smell of clothes soaked in a hot tub.
And they learned to lament the fallen, the falling,
the about to be born.
Birth was painful a long vibration like the intake
of breath after laughter.
I don't want to trouble you.
You're entering history.
Your flesh is the moon's gradual and broken.
Those boys are no consolation.
They'll circle you in inscrutable calligraphy
with no place to land.
I'm going to think about death until my mouth runs.
I'm going to look at death with a face terrible as his own.
I don't want to scare you.
After death, there are two alternatives both heartless,
memory and forgetfulness.