Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks: The Sounds of Dark Growing Tall

Yesterday I was headed to work early. It was dawn, the day still small along the eastern horizon outside the passenger window. I dropped off the skirt of Cedar Mountain and made my way down the rim of the bowl towards alfalfa fields still in darkness at the bottom, headlights picking up blades of rye and electrical poles along the side as I crossed the vast valley with scattered farm lights off in the distance holding onto the last sustenance of night as the world edged away from the deep morning towards smudgy detail.

NPR.  A short bit, a mentioning, the poet Galway Kinnell has passed away.

Though a poet, not too many poets have touched my life.  I'm not sure why.  I can count them on one hand.  A couple who I personally know.  The others dead.  Williams, Yeats.  Now Galway Kinnell too.

It brings back memories.  Poems that put me in places not too unlike this:

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy
After an afternoon of carting dung
Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing
Weary to crying, Dark was growing tall
And he began to hear the pond frogs all
Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy.

His poems touched my silent places--those moments from childhood, when though with friends, you're not really there, but instead stuck in a moment, the night growing tall, electric sounds--cicadas and crickets--stealing you away from present company and biting your subconscious with a venom which lasts forever--the eternal now.

I first read Kinnell in a class from Leslie Ullman at UTEP, and though I might not have known it at the time, his poems changed my life forever.  Nothing big.  I did return to my roots, and like him, I live on a farm (sort of).  But, I would have done that anyway.  Rock, night and soil are too much a part of who I am not to eventually pull me back.

But it's the sounds in his poems, the depth--the fusing of life and death, dark and light, thickly muddily, organically--that has changed me in some way.

Most of the students who were drawn to words then (which were not many) were drawn to Ginsberg, Brooks, Clifton or Plath, poets, who one way or another, pushed language--either neon-flashy, like Ginsberg or Plath; or homespun get-down-and-lay-it-on-the-line, like Clifton and Brooks.

Kinnell, I guess, pushes language too.  But it's different.  Whereas Ginsberg drives the sounds and images into you, it seems Kinnell sits on a worn, wood step and waits for them to arrive and then asks, "Did you hear that over there in the corn field?"  Of course, he knows you did, he's made sure you have, but he does it so casually you're not aware he's led you away from the safety of the porch until it's too late, and you'll never view the world the same again.

One night, working late at an all-night copy center on Mesa Street in El Paso and needing a poem for class in the morning, I built the following from bricks from Kinnell's poems.  It works primarily because of his words, not mine.  I'm okay with that.  I was young, yearning to be great.  In him, I felt the depth and grandness of epic time--deep water, rich soil, rotting bodies, reaching roots--stories greater than one single self. 

I don't yearn as much to be great anymore.  I'd rather sit on my back step and watch the deer violate my flower beds.  But I still believe in stories archaic deep--trilobites frozen in a limestone wall, blood in the veins, camphor in the night.  And this poem takes me back to a time I was just discovering the language of my life.

Story Built from Galway Kinnell Bricks

I had been working so long,
until midnight I think,
but it felt like three.
I closed up shop,
dragged my weary eyes up the street to Village Inn
for a needle of coffee in each socket.

And then to,
there among the fat men with shiny badges,
read Galway Kinnell,
it was like a dream, dark growing tall,
two small boys bearing cornstalk violins
--I swear I saw them!--
outside the Circle K across the street.

Above the Franklin Mountains the moon ate itself out.
Two young lovers sat on the curb,
their tennis shoes in the dusty gutter.
Headlights and hum zipped past
like lion eyes after zebra.
The young just sat there, heads trailed
by the beginning of necks,
shivering in the guarantee they'd be bodies,
flesh rivered by blue erratic wanderings
of blood, saliva passed back and forth,
hands running stone saint smooth stone.

I laid down my tip and lit
a cigarette, a small fire against
the loneliness that I knew would rain
when I tore open my bed like a polar bear
and climbed in and closed her up
after, against the wind,
to sleep in blood
and pain.

Why Teach?

Yesterday, I went into work an hour early to tutor two high school special needs students.  The one had a question every once in a while but worked primarily on his own.  The other—we’ll call him Jerry—had filled out a writing web with 11 details about why it is good to be in the “community” group rather than the “compliance” group at the boys’ home where I work.  The details were wonderful, and showed a level of maturity and sophistication you would not expect from a ninth-grade student who functions academically between a first and second grade level, in that all the details were oriented towards the opportunity to serve, learn and grow rather than the self-centered perks that come along with being in the community.  I thought cool, until I turned to his rough draft.  Instead of being about the opportunities that come with being in the community, it was about food—what is delicious and what is not. 

Damn, not again, I thought.  So far, for Jerry, there is no sequence, no connectivity, as you and I understand it, where one thought is linked to another, and details attach to a main idea.  Sure, it’s there somewhere, or that web wouldn’t have demonstrated such sophistication, but it’s not triggered the same as it is for you and I.  Therefore, I spent the next 45 minutes explaining how the web is where you brainstorm your ideas for your rough draft, that they should have something to do with each other, that although they may be apples and oranges, they are not apples and Orangutans, and all the while, he’s interrupting me in a low-level panic, “So, Mr. Steve, this is not right?” and I’m fighting frustration at his focus being on right or wrong.

“Jerry,” don’t worry about that.    Just listen.”

“I can fix, Mr. Steve.  I am a good boy.”

Yes, Jerry.  But you need to relax, slow down, listen.  You have great stuff here—both of these are good—but they don’t connect.  They don’t match.  One is a red sock, one a blue…”

At that moment, I decide, I can’t make him redo the assignment.  It will crush him.  He put his best into both.  He just didn’t grasp one thing leads to another.  Or he did, at the most important level; at the being-human level, he grasped something a lot of CEO’s don’t grasp—that the purpose of life is to serve others and enjoy good food along the way.  But, at the academic level, that whole notion of line upon line, precept upon precept was and usually is lost on Jerry.  I knew I also had to give him his task fast.  Jerry doesn’t like to wait.  He wants to work, to show he’s learning, which to him means doing—something we definitely don’t agree on, but if I can’t get across A should connect to B right now, I’m probably not going to convey the idea that more can be learned in a moment of complete stillness than in a lifetime of doing. 

So, I decide to have him write the rough draft that should go with his web on the community and the web that should go with his rough draft on delicious foods.  Will that get through to him that a web and a rough draft go together?  I won’t know until he turns it in.  Knowing Jerry, I might get something about the joys of sitting on a soft couch as his essay to go with the web on the community, and a web on different facts about China to go with his essay on delicious food.

I would go crazy if I taught only to have success.  Sure, success needs to happen too, or I should find another profession.  But to try to control all the variables that makes up a child’s future, or equally asinine, to try and ignore all those variables—genetics, family, community—is absurd.

This is a dangerous thing to say in education these days, but here it is anyways:  I teach because it blows my mind that Jerry, a ninth grader who operates at a second grade level, knows something most CEO’s don’t—that the purpose of life is to serve others and enjoy delicious food along the way.  And neither Jerry, nor the CEO knows this.  It’s my little secret (at least until now).  I get how profoundly important Jerry is to the human web and others don’t.  He isn’t a burden on society.  He is the jewel, the reason society exists.  Not just Jerry.  Not because he’s “special.”  Just because he is.  All of us, just because we are.

That’s it; that’s why I teach: to participate in children’s lives.  What could be greater than going into work an hour early to hear Jerry say, “Good Morning, Mr. Steve”?—his big jolly body announcing life is good, his big smile screaming it, just in case you don’t get that. 

Of course every teacher knows—especially middle school teachers—you’re more likely to walk down to your classroom and find one or two students sitting on the floor outside, headphones on, hunched over, hair in their eyes, wilted in doom.  And that’s great too.  Perhaps that’s why I love to teach.  Children have an honesty, and integrity about them, that somehow gets lost in most of the adult world.  Sure, sometimes it’s a bit overdramatic.  Doom?  Really?  You probably didn’t even have to make your own bed this morning.  But I prefer that to the make believe adult world where everyone is making progress, where everyone is changing the world around them for the better, this great and glorious march up the ladder towards perfection.

Teaching, if done right, is a profession where every morning you get to go into work and just be.  Kids are open.   They want to experience life outside what they learned at home.  They are hungry for the new.  Because the other teacher in our building is a permaculturist and environmentalist, our students are into all things organic.  Overall, we’re not supposed to play music with lyrics, so I play Beethoven and Tchaikovsky, but also Henry Mancini and Scott Joplin.   I even felt brazen enough to play John Denver (lyrics and all!) and they love it.  They’re always asking, “Who is this, Mr. Steve?”  We even spent twenty or so minutes watching this dude’s joy—and I simply said, “damn, you know you’ve found the right career when it makes you feel like this!”  That was my lesson.  What else could be said?

 

Really, the only reason not to teach is if you are out to rescue lives.  Sure, there may be a few gifted teachers who can carry on that intense passion you see in the movies, who will never give up on a child, who will see them through, who will be successful again and again.  On average there are two of them for every fifty other mere mortals.   The other 48 burn out trying to be that super teacher—and nothing is more dangerous to children than adults who no longer believe and yet act as if they do.   Kids have built in hypocrisy radars, bullshit detectors.  If you need to change a child’s life to bolster your ego, quit.  Become a gardener or a carpenter—something where you have a little more control over the variables.  But if you just want to be—there is a classroom of kids waiting for your example.  Because that is simply something you can’t know at such a young age.  The minute you find clothes you’re comfortable in, you’ve outgrown them.   Being doesn’t come easy, which is what a child needs most—lots of adults who are comfortable in their own skin.  That is the safety they seek.  I exist, I am, and that’s alright.   I am not a freak of nature after all.  Teaching the quadratic equation or how to diagram a complex sentence is only a vehicle to do that—a detractor from the self long enough the self can be found. 

The poet Sam Green, a great teacher of mine, once shared this with me:

My grandfather would take me out fishing, and we’d be out there in his small boat drifting, and he’d say something like, “see that rock over there,” and I’d look, and there’d be something like a moose or a bear, and I’d say, “Grandpa!  Look, a bear!”

He’d say, “Wow!” 

It wasn’t until much later I realized what he was doing.  Now that is teaching.

 

 

The Moment (Individual Worth, Buddhism, Christianity & Let It Be)

I dreamt I had paid my dues:
I had done my research;
I had sat quietly;
I had taken notes,
organized them carefully
and waited patiently--
not minutes,
not hours,
not days,
nor months, nor seasons, nor years,
but decades--yes decades--

and finally that moment came.
I stood, for I knew I had something to say;
I knew it would not be easy;
it never is in a world that talks on incessantly,
but I stood anyway, not because I wanted to.

I would rather have gone fishing,
and I don't fish.
It seems absurd to lure the hungry,
hook them and yank them from the known
out into a dry existence
where their eyes are too big
and their lungs no longer see,
where their tail flaps,
but there is no longer resistance--
the comfort of something pushing back
gently, with ease,
instead one yank out into an unknown
expanse of thinness,
of clarity.

No, fishing is no sport for me.
Let the fish swim happily
in their thick little world
of mirror liquefied
and wrapped around them
like a great quilt--light, shadow,
birth, death, movement distracting them
from the alpine air
above the lid--

Who would want to be a flying fish anyway?--
to arch out into the unknown,
to know sunlight unfiltered,
to soar up into the heavens
above your old home,
and to find everything you once knew
an illusion, to know worlds
stars, galaxies and universes without end
await your discovery.

Yes, fishing is not my sport,
but I knew my time had come,
I gathered my notes--

There was Marla's chin, eleventh grade,
perfect, and she didn't know it.
She talked on about clubbing,
about fake ID, about drunken nights
on McKinney Ave and the West End,
about meeting the members of KISS,
about going back stage, but not about
going under, being violated
by Gene Simons' foreign tongue,
nor blacking out, nor waking up
in an empty hotel suite, stumbling naked
to the bathroom,
clasping her clothes around her
as if she could remember being swaddled,
as if innocence and safety
and love were still garments you could slip into
like blue jeans and a tank top--
how she looked into the mirror and hated
her hair, her eyes, her nose, lips,
especially that chin with such intensity
she reached two perfectly manicured
fingers down the throat, tried
to offer some sort of sacrifice
to that porcelain alter--
The heaves were dry,
she had nothing left to give.
Her chin would remain beautiful,
as would her thick hair and dark eyes
to God, to me, probably many.  Perhaps
even Gene Simmons
saw the very pinpoint of creation,
of unspeakable truth and light
shine up at him as he penetrated her
and placed her forever
on the alter of Mammon,
the electricity of the whole damn universe blinking
for a millisecond, glitch after glitch,
year after year,
millennium after millennium
as small flames snuffed out.

I looked out on a great audience of incessant talking--
young couples and old, from every nation, kindred, tongue,
wine glasses in hand, slurping on pizza
or octopus, draining down Big Gulps
while stuffing mouths with popcorn and crickets,
chattering around the fringes
of their stories,
carefully stepping around
the black holes
that keep their galaxies spinning,
their tails flapping,
their gills pumping,
their eyes wide and metallic
as they navigate
their way the best they can
around the fish bowl.

I whispered, "I too have sinned"
and sat back down.

A man in a white suite, wearing sandals
and bright red socks smiled,
"Well said, brother, well said."

And I swear I saw that light
that once glimpsed
leaves this world a drop
in a sea of glory.

The Affordable Care Act Allows Me to Help Change Teenagers Lives Forever

Three years ago my wife and I decided to quit teaching in Arizona and move to rural Utah where we, with the help of my parents, built a home on my family’s land—90 acres of Juniper and gamble oak with maple and cottonwood running along the two stream beds.

It was a giant leap of faith that we’d be able to secure a means of sustenance in such a rural community, but we prayed about it, and it felt right.

Finding meaningful employment in education was difficult to say the least.  Teaching positions seldom open here, and when they do, competition is fierce, and openings are usually filled with relatives or friends with strong ties to the community.  I have no problem with that.  In communities with such small economic bases, it’s important to provide people already invested in the community with jobs before reaching out to the wider world for individuals who may not even stay.

But, as I had been away since 8^th grade, and as my step-father had been retired for years, it made getting hired very difficult for us.

We eventually were hired at a boy’s home in a near-by community as support staff, and I was hired later as one of the two teachers.

My job requires every bit as much time, ability and energy as a position at a public high school does, except I work year-around, only have three days off (Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the Fourth of July) and I don’t receive any benefits, and until recently, I only earned $12.00 an hour.

It sounds awful, but it isn’t.  Instead, it’s incredibly meaningful because the school has a strong program and changes boys’ lives forever.  Not every student finds a better version of themselves.  A few return to lives of substance abuse and crime not long after they are released.  But more than half go on to lead lives that include college, sobriety and respect for themselves and others, something their parents could only dream of prior to treatment. 

And even the kids who fail and return to their former destructive lifestyles experience a year or two of sobriety, clarity and peace, where they move ahead on their academics, and at least for a while begin to build bridges with their family.

What’s not to like about that?  And yet, if it were not for the Affordable Care Act, I would most likely have to quit and find employment elsewhere, which would require my leaving the land and community I love.  I don’t need a lot, but I do need a way to pay medical bills, and the job I have simply doesn’t provide that.

It should.  It’s even owned by a big, international healthcare company.  But the reality is that it doesn’t.  Because the Affordable Healthcare Act subsidizes my healthcare, I can do what I love to do best—help young people find themselves.

And I’m not sure that’s unfair to tax payers.  My job keeps juveniles with severely troubled backgrounds (rape, sexual deviancy, theft, violence, etc.) from becoming incarcerated adults, which costs society far more than what it costs to supplement my healthcare.  And, of course, at least while they are in treatment, my work keeps other tax payers safe.

The lie that is propagated by certain media groups is that everyone who receives government assistance is lazy.  But it’s not true.  Most Americans want to contribute to society.  Because unions have lost their bargaining power, the truth is many meaningful jobs no longer pay a living wage.  As long as that is the case, people like me, need assistance to contribute to society.

And as long as everyone is willing to put their fare share into the system, it works.  Marci and I once made healthy wages and paid a good dose of middle-class taxes, as well as gave a lot to both social programs and struggling individuals in our neighborhood.  I hope we get to that position again, but in the meantime, I’m thankful that the Affordable Care Act allows me to give troubled teens a fresh start on life.  I see the changes in these kids, and know it’s worth it.  I am not a sponge on society, and neither are many others, who because of the current economic inequality in our nation, need assistance with medical expenses.

 

 

Fall Reflection: If your garden is working you during the summer, you are doing something wrong (soil building and chop and drop).

Fall Colors near Mud Puddle, about 5 miles from Dry Creek

Fall is here, as is a cold front.  Low, heavy clouds hang along Sandrock Ridge, White Pine Peak poking his head above them.  Below the clouds, most everything is burnt sienna, with blotches of gold and crimson red.  We had a wet July and August, and the trees are extra vibrant.  So much so, even while dealing with the pain of this infection, I forced myself to get out and see the colors closer than from the sliding-glass door.  Even as close as Dry Creek Canyon is to the house, I had to drive over and take photos from inside the car, but it was worth it.  I also drove up an area known as Mud Puddle, a low, wet saddle filled with Maple, about five miles from here.

Fall colors at Dry Creek, about 200 feet from the house

It takes a while to re-acquaint yourself with a region.  Although we’ve always spent our summers here at Dry Creek, it was our vacation home.  I did plant a few flowers during those breaks, had trees on drip, and kept a nice lawn, but I never got to know the earth again as I did as a child.  It’s hard to explain, but there is a difference between seeing a place and knowing a place.  After you stay put for a while, it’s as if there is some sort of spiritual exchange, where you become part of the place and the place becomes part of you.  You grow into each other.  It’s sad, for so many, career paths have replaced that connection.  Hardly anyone is from anywhere these days.  I don’t think that is meant to be.  For thousands of years local has been a definition of who we are.  True, migration always took place—Europeans uprooted themselves and came to America, east-coasters moved west, but those events took place once or twice in a lifetime, not every three to four years. Even migrant cultures, like the plains Indians, had a territory that they walked and rode seasonally.  Anyway, this is first summer since we moved back where I really felt grounded.  Part of that has to do with finding steady employment that meets our basic financial needs, but most of it just has to do with being here long enough to reacquaint myself with the land.

In fact, I’ve become so grounded, I hardly even leave my garden except to go to work.  I use to spend quite a bit of time on the ATV, riding up the canyon to see the creek, cottonwood, willow and foothills.  Once I got my fish pond and borders in out back, there seemed little reason to venture beyond the back yard, other than to water Marci’s cutting flowers over by the trailer, and to feed the chickens.


This small pond attracts dragon flies, bees, wild turkey, coyotes--and maybe even a mountain lion.



Marci's cutting-flower garden with our house in the background

Everything I needed to enjoy life was right outside the sliding glass doors.  The pond drew dragonflies, bees, wasps ,and wild turkey during the day, and at night coyotes.  I had humming birds, butterflies and tarantulas.  Every day something new had died and gone to seed, and something new was blooming in its place.  It was like watching the show Nature—only live and up close.

Flowers in the vegetable garden--food and color grow well together

That was up until late-July.  Then, the pain from this infection made even my garden out of reach.  Rio and Marci took over most of the watering.  Then, I watched from my recliner.  It wasn’t quite the same.  I could no longer watch the dragon flies hover above the pond—my favorite activity.   But, I could still watch the ever-changing tapestry of color, notice how a sun flower is peaking in the kitchen window, now almost the whole window is a picture of golden blooms, and now—dang they are so tall, the blooms are above the sight of the window!

Jack drinks from a saucer in the garden--even after a summer of no care, the garden has charm.

Yesterday was the first time I’ve really been able to spend any time in my garden in over a month.  Other than watering, it hasn’t been cared for since mid-July: no weeding, no thinning, no pruning.  And it’s still beautiful!  If you plant seed and water, nature takes care of itself.  People who think gardening is too much work don’t know how to garden.  Only lawns enslave their masters.  Gladiolas, black-eyed-susans, marigolds, amaranth, sunflower, tomatoes, zucchini—they just grow!  All you have to do is watch humming birds and butterflies.  Sure, it’s nice to pull that morning glory that’s yanking down that clump of bachelor’s buttons, but it’s not necessary.  Even entangled and pulled askew, they still bloom magnificently.

Sunflowers retain their beauty even after going to seed.

The main thing to do is grow soil.  That’s why my garden was so stingy last year.  I didn’t have enough soil.  This year I did.  It takes a while to grow soil.  My challenge this fall is to get well enough to dump leaves, sticks and horse poop over the dry bones and wilted flesh of this year’s garden.  That, after all is the most important part of gardening.

As I learn more, I’m realizing that the work of gardening takes place in the late fall and early spring.  Summer is the time to kick back, watch and enjoy.  If your garden is working you during the summer, you are doing something wrong.

Enjoy these two videos on soil building, and begin building a soil today that will create a relatively work-free garden next summer.