*sigh* I miss teaching. This was the AP poem this year and I love it:
XIV - Derek Walcott With the frenzy of an old snake shedding its skin, the speckled road, scored with ruts, smelling of mold, twisted on itself and reentered the forest where the dasheen leaves thicken and folk stories begin. Sunset would threaten us as we climbed closer to her house up the asphalt hill road, whose yam vines wrangled over gutters with the dark reek of moss, the shutters closing like the eyelids of that mimosa called Ti-Marie; then—lucent as paper lanterns, lamplight glowed through the ribs, house after house— there was her own lamp at the black twist of the path. There’s childhood, and there’s childhood’s aftermath. She began to remember at the minute of the fireflies, to the sound of pipe water banging in kerosene tins, stories she told to my brother and myself. Her leaves were the libraries of the Caribbean. The luck that was ours, those fragrant origins! Her head was magnificent, Sidone. In the gully of her voice shadows stood up and walked, her voice travels my shelves. She was the lamplight in the stare of two mesmerized boys still joined in one shadow, indivisible twins.
Life begins, you make some friends, what futures you plan for one another. No failures here, no one sent to prison. When you first start out, you can't imagine you won't succeed, even if the road’s unclear, your parents call you dumb and your brother beats you up, somehow you’ll pull it off, even if what you want is to rob a bank, to be a first rate crook, but mostly we start out idealistic-doctors, astrophysicists-or maybe we have a taste for fame and money-actors, stock brokers–but always something at the top and always several: Maybe I’ll be this or that, we say. And mostly our friends encourage us just so weíll encourage them. Sure you’ll be a surgeon, they say, you got the hands. So we loll about the riverbank with our first cigar and watch the ducks float by. It’s summer and third grade is dead forever. We lean back on our elbows and blow some smoke. I’ll be an astronaut, you say, and own a fleet of trucks. You bet, says your cousin, and I’ll play ball. And he’s the guy who dies a drunk at thirty-five. Think of the moment when you at last catch on. Some kids get it right away, others not so quick. One day you experience a click in your head when the world turns from one place to another. Does the sky change color, the river get colder? Like when you stroll into the local diner after school for a Coke and a hot pretzel, a place you visit everyday to meet your pals, but today your pals are having fun someplace else and there instead are half a dozen kids you’ve never seen before: sixth graders for certain. They snatch your pack, toss your stuff around, one tears your shirt, another rips your books. What's their reason? They don’t need a reason. When the world you love is exchanged for another, it’s like that.
**************************************** Margaret Atwood - you fit into me
you fit into me like a hook into an eye
a fish hook an open eye
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After Making Love We Hear Footsteps By Galway Kinnell
For I can snore like a bullhorn or play loud music or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman and Fergus will only sink deeper into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash, but let there be that heavy breathing or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house and he will wrench himself awake and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together, after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies, familiar touch of the long-married, and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens, the neck opening so small he has to screw them on— and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep, his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other and smile and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body— this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making, sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake, this blessing love gives again into our arms.
************************************************ The ABC of Aerobics Peter Meinke
Air seeps through alleys and our diaphragms balloon blackly with this mix of carbon monoxide and the thousand corrosives a city doles out free to its constituents; everyone’s jogging through Edgemont Park, frightened by death and fatty tissue, gasping at the maximal heart rate, hoping to outlive all the others streaming in the lanes like lemmings lurching towards their last jump. I join in despair knowing my arteries jammed with lint and tobacco, lard and bourbon - my medical history a noxious marsh: newts and moles slink through the sodden veins, owls hoot in the lungs’ dark branches; probably I shall keel off the john like queer Uncle George and lie on the bathroom floor raging about Shirley Clark, my true love in seventh grade, God bless her wherever she lives tied to that turkey who hugely undervalues the beauty of her tinny earlobes, one view of which (either one: they are both perfect) would add years to my life and I could skip these x-rays, turn in my insurance card, and trade yoga and treadmills and jogging and zen and zucchini for drinking and dreaming of her, breathing hard.