I couldn’t handle it, and I felt strong
enough to admit it back then.
So on the third day of 6th grade,
I cried not to go back to school.
I’d just come there from a 42-student,
two-room K-8 church school
on Marinette County farmland,
where the playground stretched for acres,
and the sky over cornfields was clear for miles.
But Crivitz had half-lockers, chain-link fence,
each hour was a classroom change.
The rules seemed arcane, and I wanted rules,
but no one would tell me them straight.
My lone friend was a lisper, and I needed friends,
but I couldn’t hear what she said.
I complained of an upset stomach.
The counselor sat me on a dusty sofa,
made me shoot Koosh balls
at the poster of a basset hound’s sad face,
which didn’t help out a kid getting hit
in the head by boys pitching fistfuls of paper
on the third day of 6th grade.
So I cried not to go back to school, back then,
when I was strong enough to be undignified,
in the dim inside of a doublewide trailer,
where we sat on the sofa and it puffed out dust.
And my arms flung out like bedsheet ropes,
from the window of my anxious gut.
And they hung midair an instant too long
because you had to decide if you’d catch me.
Then you leaned in, conceding to catch me.
Well, I felt our unhitched moment.
Two train cars on the frozen north rail
which ran by both schoolyards,
two train cars just uncoupled and running
together in wobbly, failing momentum.
Then one sped ahead, as the other slowed,
and no one really got hurt.
But the distance is impossibly huge now.
I felt it, but like I would so often stash
my chore allowance in several odd jars
I spent all my strength finding
hiding spots for my hard-earned anger.
So I hated the sofa, and I hated that dog
for holding my stupid pain. And then
I thought differently about throwing things.But you kept me at home after that,
and I kept careful about being dignified,
and I learned a whole lot in 6th grade
in the doublewide trailer on farmland
cut through by the frozen north rail.
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