Before lunch the next day, while Rachel Flanagan drove to St? Mary's to pick up Hartley, Tom sat at his desk and wrote the first and last poem of his life. He did not know why he suddenly wanted to write poetry — he never read it, barely knew what it looked like, thought of it as the sententious verse he had been made to learn in the Junior School. 'Breathes there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said,/This is mine own, my native land!' His own little terrace of lines seemed so unlike real poetry to him that he did not bother to title it. This is what he wrote:
Man in the air, do you fly by your own wings?
Animals and birds speak to you
and you in the air understand them,
Football, magic, dreams trouble
my mind, cards tackle other cards
and scatter in a valley.
Man in the air, were you that bird?
Who magicked himself away in dark?
Man in the air, father me back. Now,
while you and I and he have time.
Two years later, when he struggled to produce an assigned poem for Mr. Fitz-Hallan's junior English class, he found that he was unable, even if he tried to follow Fitz-Hallan's advice. ('You could begin every line with the same word. Or name a color in every line. Or end every line with the name of a different country.') He pulled the old poem from his desk and in despair handed it in. The poem came back with an A and the comment in Fitz-Hallan's cursive hand that This poem is sensitive and mature, and must have been difficult for you to write. Don't you have a title? I'd like to put it in the school magazine, with your permission.
Under the title 'When We All Lived in the Forest,' it appeared in the winter issue of the school magazine for that year.
11
Frosty the Snowman
In the big auditorium down the hall from our homeroom, we filed into the first two rows of seats for our first chapel. Mr. Broome, Mrs. Olinger, and a tall gray-haired man with a long severe face who looked like a bank president were seated on fan-back wooden chairs before us. To the right of them stood a lectern made of champagne-colored wood.
When I looked around I saw Mr. Weatherbee join the rank of teachers leaning against the rear wall. Between the lounging teachers and ourselves the rest of the school was taking its seats: sophomores directly behind us, then the juniors, and the seniors in the last rows. Nearly everyboy, I noticed, wore a blue button-down shirt and neatly striped tie under his jacket; many of the boys were wearing suits. Collectively, the juniors and seniors had a raffish look. Privilege encased them, surrounded them like armor. In the cast of their faces was the assumption that they would never have to take anything very seriously. For the first time in my life I saw the truth in the old proposition that the rich were better-looking.
Mr. Broome stood up and went to the lectern. He raked us in the first rows with his eyes, and then his face adjusted to a brisk, dry administrative mask. 'Boys. Let us begin with a prayer.'
A noise of shuffling, of activity, as a hundred boys bent over their knees.
'Give us the wisdom to know what is right, and the understanding to know what is good. Let us partake of knowledge, and use it to become better men. Let us all spend this new school year with hope, with diligence and discipline, and with ever-renewed application. Amen.'
He looked up. 'Now. We begin a new year. What does this mean? It means that you boys will be asked to do some demanding things. You will be asked to work as hard as you ever have, and to stretch your minds. College is a bit closer for all of you, and college is not for loafers. Therefore, we do not permit slackers and loafers here. Pay
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