The
Weed and the Tower
1.
In the sixth grade there was Shirley who yawned
in the face of our
teacher and smoked cigarettes.
Her mouth always riled Mr. Dron.
Her sneer was a red weed out on the edge
of the playground fence,
hugging the ground
to resist every boot
step and picker and tarnation wind,
the so-sweet hum of the
beyond
making it
hunker ever lower and flatter, not in fear but just to stand
the sheer bliss of its
own very excellent badness.
Now, in my own grown-up version of error, I imagine that
weed
unhitching from
its concrete or asphalt.
It rears up hugely and strides, in roughly the shape of a
woman,
but leafier and redder,
roots and root hairs trailing,
into a classroom mocking
the bad kids there
for their pathetic
efforts at defiance.
And it scares the parents and teachers and principles
by getting only bigger
and bolder, more prickly and inexplicable
with every demerit they
care to dole out.
All the bad children, derided though they are by the weed,
draw near, tug on its scratchy
edges, can't tear themselves away.
And eventually the nervous authorities
and confused experts find
this plant-woman seeping
out of the cracks in the
ceilings and the stains on the floors.
It starts their cars and unties their shoes,
scribbles in
the grade books and keeps spinning around
and around in the
principle's chair with his mail on the floor like confetti.
The adults feel a warm irritation in their hands
which is
the weed, and their scariest dreams are the weed soon enough.
Indeed the big red weed by now is the ground
buoying up
everyone like it or not.
Every student in my class—the Gum Tree snobs, the solo
Afro, the Ra-Ras,
Sheila the Retardo and Bruce the Lugger of Books,
the slightly bad, the bad
bad, and the hopelessly damned—
we're all
floating and miserably happy, holding our breath
on this great and dark
and inescapable day…
2.
Which now starts rolling everyone up. It's a satchel
carried by a
tired old mother down a dry, dirt road
in some old country way
before cars. She comes to a cross roads
and waits,
and while she's waiting
she grinds her teeth in hunger.
She scrapes pictures in the dust
with her cane: one is a cathedral with the alphabet lining
its walls, each bright
letter appearing to emerge
from the mouth of the
last: B the bad after accident or apple,
for instance,
clear down
to Z and the dark, ripe sound
of something alien and
dismaying
approaching us
soon, no doubt very soon.
*
This time, though, the only arrival
is a man on a horse,
easing and huffing down from the sky. He
pulls alongside
the woman, slides off
with a flurry of whip and cape and high black boots.
He's full of scorn.
No, he says, those letters do not move
one from the other with
such cosmic smoothness.
They're shiny, hard, distinct kinds of things.
C for example is absence
of perfection—get used
to it.
E is a comb to comb through the news, when at last you
receive it.
F the same comb broken and defeated.
And G just another ragged attempt
at a nice, round
thing. Better to MARCH, DAMN IT, MARCH
IN A LINE…
But, says the woman, the line always goes
in a circle, broken or
not; whereon the sky
slurps up
the man like a failed tornado.
*
The sky tries again: this time a very
small man
drops from
the clouds like a shoe. He sits up
dazed, brushing the dust
from his blue enormous
ears and voluminous knees.
What do these signs I've made on the ground
really
mean? the
mother asks the man.
Dashing around, he gathers an armful of bones
and lays it gently at the
old woman's feet.
Then he points to the stars.
He recites Homer and Shakespeare. He chews
on a big stick of gum,
slaphappy and simple.
He says: Tools to
break
the silence. He says:
Spooks to take
us back.
*
Then he pulls out a nice language sandwich.
A free-verse, two-line deal with asterisk spices, if you
want the truth.
And as the sandwich disappears, so does he: his feet, then
hands, arms torso etcetera,
until the
last bite vanishes into his mouth, and his mouth
completely
vanishes too.
*
And a slow little snowfall, now, starts to fall.
A hungry stillness in motion. Letters. Words.
A not exactly incoherent syntax, each sweet crystal wanting
the earth. The tip of a leaf, for
example. Or the lower lip
of someone waiting on a
road.
And the shapes of the children the old mother carries
begin to
appear in the snow.
In fact, as it falls it seems to create them,
even while passing right
through them,
till the students now are standing
in two different worlds:
in one they are back in
the school,
covered in
dust and blood and leaves and thorns,
the teacher scolding them
all for their mess.
In the other they are glittering and silver,
they are delicate and
good…
*
And the snow in the spot where the small
man vanished
gathers and
gathers, rising and building
till it's a tower or a
pillar, inscrutable and white,
solid but
airy, pointed but round…
And the students in their freedom start dancing
around this
tower of earth and sky, the here and the there,
though the
tower itself doesn't break.
It's a swirling vortex entirely itself, exclusive,
inclusive, and
no sign represents it,
though its
very substance is signs.
It's driving the bad kids crazy, reflected upside down
then right side up in the
eye of their minds,
and I don't know how to
end this,
I can't get around that gentle, tyrannical form,
except to
leave those children dancing
around and around…