Enrich the outer landscape.
Why they hired me, I can’t fathom. Age twenty-two, I maybe lied that I had a degree, and I did boast in the interview about three community teaching jobs, two of which were fibs: I’d filled in for a pal working with seniors at the Jewish community center. There I’d befriended a stately holocaust survivor who showed me you could live like an intellectual whether you were in school or not. He loaned me a translation of Dante’s Inferno , which I left on a bus one drunken night, baldly lying it was stolen—what mugger says, Hand over the Dante!
Walt and his wife also hooked me up running a weekly class for severely disturbed kids, but I couldn’t handle it. A few months in, I’d had to restrain a psychotic girl in my lap, making my body a living straitjacket, crossing her arms across her chest and wrapping my legs outside hers. Ten and bird-boned, she was. I never went back.
My real teaching job involved a group home for fairly functional retarded women. Once per week after their factory piecework, I showed up with a canvas tote bag of poesie. Only a few could read a little; others just signed their names—the vast majority, not even. They spoke their poems while the staff and I wrote them out. At the end I’d read a handful, then type them all up to copy and pass out the next week.
To say the women changed my life may be a stretch, but only just. I’d been worrying the bone of whether to go back to school for poetry. Or what? Sell kisses at the train depot? Some days all I did to be poetic was wander the public library in black clothes and muddy lipstick. Hell, I’d even moved to England for a spell, tramping around the hills looking at sheep and daffodils. How to go forward was otherwise foggy.
Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety.
The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the Church of Poetry.
That first day I stood at the window of a dayroom looking down as the bus disgorged them. Shedding their coats and the clasped-on mittens that flapped from their coat sleeves, the women bumbled out. They dropped hats or pencils or keys or lunch boxes. One trying tofind the end of her scarf turned around in a circle like a slow-motion cat chasing its tail. This halted the women behind her, a few of whom bumped into her and each other.
As staff people herded them in, I felt my armpits grow damp. The faster ladies spilled into the room around me like kids lining up for a pony ride. A flat-faced woman with the severe and snaggled underbite of a bulldog stood introducing herself with a handshake before she sat. I’m Marion Pinski, she said. P like Polack Pinski. She wore a brown beret flat atop her head like nothing so much as a cow pie.
Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls’. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they’d been grown underground. It’s a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.
Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me. Looking at her, I felt smart all of a sudden, also lucky. You could talk these women out of their bus tokens. Still, glad I’d dodged the bullet they’d caught almost implicated me in their handicap. (At the time I saw only their difficulties. Now I also marvel that they could with verve hug an individual they’d just gotten off the bus with, and that total strangers shampooed
Why they hired me, I can’t fathom. Age twenty-two, I maybe lied that I had a degree, and I did boast in the interview about three community teaching jobs, two of which were fibs: I’d filled in for a pal working with seniors at the Jewish community center. There I’d befriended a stately holocaust survivor who showed me you could live like an intellectual whether you were in school or not. He loaned me a translation of Dante’s Inferno , which I left on a bus one drunken night, baldly lying it was stolen—what mugger says, Hand over the Dante!
Walt and his wife also hooked me up running a weekly class for severely disturbed kids, but I couldn’t handle it. A few months in, I’d had to restrain a psychotic girl in my lap, making my body a living straitjacket, crossing her arms across her chest and wrapping my legs outside hers. Ten and bird-boned, she was. I never went back.
My real teaching job involved a group home for fairly functional retarded women. Once per week after their factory piecework, I showed up with a canvas tote bag of poesie. Only a few could read a little; others just signed their names—the vast majority, not even. They spoke their poems while the staff and I wrote them out. At the end I’d read a handful, then type them all up to copy and pass out the next week.
To say the women changed my life may be a stretch, but only just. I’d been worrying the bone of whether to go back to school for poetry. Or what? Sell kisses at the train depot? Some days all I did to be poetic was wander the public library in black clothes and muddy lipstick. Hell, I’d even moved to England for a spell, tramping around the hills looking at sheep and daffodils. How to go forward was otherwise foggy.
Maybe the girls in my gym class had been right all along, and poetry was a trick on smart people—a bunch of hooey, fawned over by whining fops of the most stick-up-the-ass variety.
The way an uncertain believer might stumble onto proof of God, the women at the group home fully converted me to the Church of Poetry.
That first day I stood at the window of a dayroom looking down as the bus disgorged them. Shedding their coats and the clasped-on mittens that flapped from their coat sleeves, the women bumbled out. They dropped hats or pencils or keys or lunch boxes. One trying tofind the end of her scarf turned around in a circle like a slow-motion cat chasing its tail. This halted the women behind her, a few of whom bumped into her and each other.
As staff people herded them in, I felt my armpits grow damp. The faster ladies spilled into the room around me like kids lining up for a pony ride. A flat-faced woman with the severe and snaggled underbite of a bulldog stood introducing herself with a handshake before she sat. I’m Marion Pinski, she said. P like Polack Pinski. She wore a brown beret flat atop her head like nothing so much as a cow pie.
Alongside her squeezed other women, whose heads seemed small as dolls’. Under narrow shoulders, their bodies went mountainously soft. And they were mushroom-pale, as if they’d been grown underground. It’s a shocking thing to face all at once so many kecked-up, genetically disadvantaged humans. In a country that values power and ease and symmetry, velocity and cunning, kinks in their genetic code had robbed them of currency.
Somebody touched my foot. Looking down, I found a sandy-haired woman tugging on my boot buckle. Katie Butke, she introduced herself as. Katie was solid as a fireplug and clean as a boiled peanut, affable but unimpressed by the likes of me. Looking at her, I felt smart all of a sudden, also lucky. You could talk these women out of their bus tokens. Still, glad I’d dodged the bullet they’d caught almost implicated me in their handicap. (At the time I saw only their difficulties. Now I also marvel that they could with verve hug an individual they’d just gotten off the bus with, and that total strangers shampooed
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