Convolution
1.
Nicotine practically squished through his pours
when he’d lean and come upright at the front of the room
whetting my mind with delectable theorems,
causing wonder and glad reasoning
back when reasoning was glad, a soft moldy home
of what do you know. I could do it. I could do the hard problems
faster than friends. I was turning in air, my mind a blue diamond, it was how my mind worked
though the best of my thoughts, I’m telling you, never
did not have flesh on them.
I feel
my thoughts, or my thoughts feel me, and though maybe I’m not
convincing you yet, I’ll say it again: I truly don’t know
why people think thinking is heartless
or the heart idiotic. Mr. M’s mug, anyway, to get back to
the man
in this poem, was brownish
yellowish just like tobacco,
a leathery leaf, an old hanging stain,
though he was not all that old. He’d render the suant
lines which reason could prove to be infinite,
even though reason, at the same time, could prove they were lines
of nothing but dust on a chalkboard. The kind of cough
which “concerns” us,
like he smoked not only cigarettes
but whole sticks of chalk and boxes of pencils
and faculty gossip and gasoline
shortages and all
of the variously embarrassing Seventies, too small a decade
for this scree and sticky debris
field of a teacher.
A bit of a jock, actually, he’d call me up to his desk
to study his specially diagramed moves,
having seen me play dismally
for the team on the courts downtown. He didn’t seem to hear me
when I explained how unserious
I was about tennis, and not only that, I could rally the shit
out of opponents, provided no one was looking.
Like that afternoon practice, one day, late in the park: Margaret Valenzuela
and I had to plug several quarters
to be so evenly matched that we played ourselves nearly to death
and I sure as hell don’t remember who won.
But he never saw me shining like that. And I sort of resented
him, or someone, I don’t know who, that I had bombed so badly
the one time he watched; that someone was always expected
to kill or be killed.
The thing is, however—and this must be the reason
I’m writing, afterall—he was smart. He was smart in a mineral
sensory way, and that’s how I like them. An oddball brainy jock
of a teacher with a drunk’s wrecked complexion,
ditto fluid dampening the cuffs of his shirt
and his soggy sighing mind
nonetheless spinning
hot like a top,
or flipping through books about history, his hobby.
2.
The momentary club of the intelligently ruined
met every
of one of our high school’s more disaffected teachers.
For a brief time, that is, this congress of hipster oafs and dregs,
loyalists of the natural food and groovy music nosh,
commenced. This was in Ojai,
understand, in
a gorgeous hippie-haven valley
with a
in nearby
and the usual well-mannered, whitebread schools
where everything was out in the sun. Well,
not the classrooms, that is, but the corridors
and the lunch tables and the oak trees of course
so completely out in the sun.
We all hung out on the lawns. We’d actually sign up for “lawn”
in homeroom each morning. That is, until I started hanging
with that one bunch of lopsided angels, the Order of the Semi-
Socialistically Pure, the At Least a Little Bit Interesting
If a Little Bit Wonkish, Anti-Corporate Demi-Nuns
and Demi-Monks
for lunch. My guy Scott, for example:
always on some Scott-kind of diet,
with near-toxic levels of vitamin A.
I had briefly entered, you see, the wandering and discomfitted life
of this boy whose loneliness only now
becomes obvious to me. We went to cemeteries. Yeah. Cemeteries.
Because he was funny and he was like that and his mother
had died. And we drove all over
the place, freakily platonic. We did not neck, we did not get it on
in his gleaming green Vega or too-yellow Bug.
(Although, when finally we got pretty raunchy
one day on the living room couch, well, naturally,
in walked my folks.
They did not say a word. No one said a word.
We all just got up, got dressed, took off
like lights from the center
of an exploding
firecracker, high in the sky.)
Anyway, who was that generous teacher?
Not remarkable looking, slender and clean, no hippie and didn’t teach anything
that I can recall. Just ate the groovy food. Yeah, that was it.
A sprouts and nuts man, and hard core bicycle racer, I think. A smart guy whose smarts
stood off to one side, quietly
respectful of the body’s
intelligence. Sweet guy and a haven
for toxic unplaceables or the didn’t-wish-to-be-placed,
which I have steadfastly remained even after
I was out of that out-group and back in the in.
As I have often been known to proclaim, I was and always
have been
mobile.