SONNETS FOR MR. LEWIS / John Philip Drury 1. Searching for people on the Internet, I stumbled on my English teacher’s name from junior high: “openly gay . . . Corvette- driving . . . died from a heart attack . . .” It came as news to me, who cowered through ninth grade and owe him everything, learning the words of poems he cut out, mounted, and displayed: Eliot, Hopkins, Yeats on bulletin boards. Authority, though, was jolting, like a slap of water on a schooner, when the bay rose and struck back at faulty seamanship. How can I thank him now? How can I say I’ll always be your student, and you’ll be the hidden voice that keeps on prodding me? 2. He roared “I can’t stand chaos!” with the glare of a literary Führer at a rally, pacing, his fingers brushing a shock of hair from his forehead, menacing as a bully. Never had any lessons been so hushed as when his “good class” cringed, the unhappy few who waited on that shore where breakers crashed. Walking down Massachusetts Avenue, under a railroad bridge, up a long hill of log steps, past Little Falls Library to junior high, its locker-jostled halls, I dawdled under the maples’ canopy. Though a bad pupil, shirking homework, still I hovered in his classroom after school. 3. My classmates who were friends (or so I assume) picked up the briefcase from beside my chair and passed it to the far side of the room. After the bell, they launched it down the stairs. And they were right to rid me of the prop, my stab at better learning through office supplies. Sitting there, quiet, listening, I dropped the pseudo-intellectual disguise. For he expected us to start our novels, compose a group of sonnets, diagram the sentences of Proust, track articles on index cards—his own curriculum. I wanted a how-to guide, a nod that yes, you’re welcome in this world of consciousness. 4. Someone must still be driving his Corvette faster than any limits, itching to pass the slowpokes through the mountains. He could get inflamed by sluggishness! One day in class, the anger he could usually restrain broke like an open boat upon the strand. He smashed his right fist through the windowpane but came back, scrawling with his bandaged hand. A fiery sports car for a fiery mind reflected him. I didn’t want to be one of the “stones” that he could hardly stand to have in class. And though I didn’t hurry doing much of anything, I did worry his anger was about to fall on me. 5. The trainer flicks her clicker, and the cat leaps on the upright log and hurries up to snatch a food reward. The ocelot, easy with the long leash, pauses on top until another click, then climbs back down, head-first, hugging the bark of the scarred tree, tumbling onto a platform, stone on stone, slinking its way back to captivity. “We don’t teach any tricks,” the trainer says. “They learn behaviors.” But aren’t the tricks what everyone wants to learn, how to amaze the public like a crafty acrobat? “It matters, look, it matters,” he insisted, snapping his fingers at every moment wasted. 6. Taking the curves around jutting cliffs and redwood bluffs, the Stingray swerves above ocean waves. He downshifts, laughs at the critics’ gaffes about recitatives on the opera quiz. The Pacific roars, its bravos his and the blazing car’s. Everything is in the stars, in the stars. 7. Like John Keats, peppering his tongue to feel the soothing coolness of claret, he exposes his flesh to the sun’s mimicry of hell, until he dives into the sea and rises beyond the breakers, floating on a swell and sinking in a trough. The salty breezes can’t blow him very far off shore. The pull of tides can’t hold him long, unless he chooses. Today, he has the freedom of the beach, no students haunting him. (He does the haunting, for surely he must know that when you teach, the lessons have the power of enchanting for a lifetime of lost time.) Let him stand, naked, exultant on the burning sand. (Published in Sou’wester, Fall 2003, and reprinted in Sea Level Rising, Able Muse Press, 2015)
Posted on: Fri, 19 Dec 2014 23:10:30 +0000
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