From Such Fallowness Imagination Soars

Roy C. Andrews. Classroom, ca.1911.

University of Oregon Photograph Collection

Teaching by Nature

James Hart

"it's spring and the goat-footed

baloonMan whistles far and wee" 

~ "in Just"  by e. e. cummings

We construe autumn lessons for you,

share yellow notes of leaves we carry

here from time’s college of the soul,

geese's check marks on far margins

of the sky, old familiar words we say

year in year out like whiskered frost

x-ing over text on pages in dead grass.

We chalk desire’s lush verbal phrases

across winter’s bleak squeaky board,

sometimes our participles dangle ice

in our minds, time’s vague antecedents

waiting to be clarified like sky as years

settle in powdery drifts across the floor

if your custodial ears will not hear us.

Class, I hope you’re all taking notes:

you join fragments to hapless clauses

and discern when to let your sentences

run on beyond black night’s horizons;

you learn to scan context from the stars

and know, like Cummings, when to void

punctuation’s rules, and feel green buds

sprout poetry in goats and barren souls.

(Poem from unpublished manuscript

entitled Somewhere West of Never)