“When I was outside, I was afraid every day wolves would swallow me up. In here, that’s no worry.”
                -Mac Burnett & Jon Klassen, The Wolf, The Duck & The Mouse

                One of the great things about my niece is that, after she calls for me rather early in the morning, she suggests that I might want to read a book. And while I might think some silly things like “It’s too early,” I realize, a few pages into The Wolf, The Duck & The Mouse, that I really would like to. Thank you.
                The book starts with the mouse, who is quickly swallowed up by the wolf. Inside the mouse meets the goose, who’s still in bed: “I may have been swallowed,” says the goose, “But I have no intention of being eaten.” When the goose learns it’s daytime outside, he gets up, and invites the mouse to have breakfast. And so they go about making good lives in the wolf’s belly.
                When what I’m afraid of actually happens, when its jaws go wide and swallow me down, it’s usually not as bad as my continual fear was at the beginning. One of my early examples of this was in kayaking: the idea of flipping over in the middle of a rapid was terrifying, until I did it. Then I rolled up, and it wasn’t so bad. Lying in bed before an important day, I can spin out of control thinking about how horrible it’ll be if I’m not rested for tomorrow; tomorrow, when I’m not rested, I go about doing what I can. The idea of getting rejected from a program I really, really want is far more crushing than the rejection itself. Years ago, my friend actually recommended all this as an exercise: when you’re scared, think what you’re scared of; imagine it happening; what then? 
                I don’t want to dodge all my fears–many of them are useful. I know people who simply will not text and drive because they’re scared of killing someone. I’d like to hold onto that fear. I also don’t want to presume that this works for all fears: my examples deal with relatively tame threats. Does the same thing happen with something bigger? I don’t know. I’m thinking about it.
                We’ve made fear, made failure, into a nightmare bogeyman waiting behind every tree, and now we go running ahead of him. Burnett’s goose says that, once the wolf catches us, once we build a bed and a breakfast table in the pit of his stomach, we’ll realize that where we are is a place where we can go on living. There might even be time for toast, or a before-breakfast book with my niece.

                “But poetry says things that nothing else can. It snares the edges of the unspeakable. It grazes dreams. It stands with feet in several worlds. It says two or three things at once, and then denies them all in favor of silence.”
                -James Tate, in his introduction to James Welch’s Riding the Earthboy 40

                Over the last few years, poetry has become my favorite thing to teach. I think everyone can write a poem. That’s not because it’s easier than prose, or because it’s harder, or anything about the difficulty. Perhaps its because poetry, in the end, is grounded in silence, and however loud we think we are or pretend to be, we’ve all been silent.
                Whenever I start with a new group of students, someone asks, “But what is poetry?” Sometimes I ask it just to get ahead of the question, but the truth is, I’m always a little “Oh boy…” when it comes up. Not “Oh boy!” like excited for the first snow, but “oh boy…” like when you come back at 11 pm and realize you put your only pair of sheets in the washer that afternoon, but not the dryer. You’ll have to do something, and whatever you do it’ll be okay, but it’s not going to be great and (if you’re me) it’s not going to be the last time you do this.
                Back at Amherst, when someone gave The Question to Professor David Sofield, he opened our book and pointed around the words: “This stuff,” he said. “The blank space. That’s what makes it a poem.” I thought he was joking, but reading Tate, Sofield’s answer comes back to me. It’s the blank space. It’s the margin around a moment. It’s the room we sit in, listening. Last semester, when my students kept pushing, I eventually told them: “You know when you’re sitting in the cafeteria, and you’re talking about some BS TV show or a piece of gossip, and you couldn’t care less about it, but you keep saying it all the same? Poetry is not that.”
                Everyone can write a poem. These days, I love trying to open that space for someone to try. Try to say the things you can’t. Try to graze a dream, which could mean brushing a finger against it, and could also mean bending down your head and tasting it, intent and careful like this morning’s deer. Notice that there are two or three things you mean, and once you’ve done that, notice the silence. Sometimes it’s the silence that has something to say. Whenever I sit down a moment, whenever I make a little space (instead of trying to or pretending to), that silence is there.

                “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”
                -Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton

                “That was his thing, I’d noticed. Doing everything with an ironic twist. Like he was going to laugh at himself before anyone else could.” -Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

                When I first heard Miranda’s line, I heard “fall” like “die,” as in “remember the fallen.” Hamilton was asking, “If you don’t believe in anything, what’ll you die for?” Then again, we use that little word to mean all sorts of things.
                As a high school teacher–and okay, as someone walking around today–I see a lot of people who refuse to come out and believe in something. I can understand why. Once I believe in something, I’ve shown you how to mock me.  Once I tell you what’s important to me (the thinking goes, subconsciously or otherwise) I’ve shown you how to hurt me. And maybe that’s true.
                I’ve let that “ironic twist” pull me away from all sorts of things. It’s the reason why I still “won’t dance,” and not in Sinatra’s super cool dancy way. I’ve been too worried to start learning. It seemed so important, and I felt so bad at it. (I finally talked to a dance teacher: if I need to look like a clumsy goat in rollerskates, then I need to look like a clumsy goat it rollerskates, because it’s long past time to try). Growing up, watching my big brother, I ran into something similar with basketball and kayaking and plenty of other things–he seemed so much better, and I didn’t see how I could follow him. (Luckily for me, he worked really, really hard to teach me  and bring me along. He still does). All this is nothing new: go to almost any classroom, and you’ll see someone not caring because they don’t want to end up a fool. Watch yourself for a while. Maybe you’ll see the same thing.
                “If you stand for nothing, Burr, what’ll you fall for?”
                That little word can mean so many things. Heroes “fall” while fighting, and we’re all worried about “falling” for someone’s trick, and Lucifer’s existence changed after “the fall,” but there’s another meaning. I can fall for something. I can fall for someone. Against the odds and without that much explanation, that something or someone suddenly comes to mean the world to me, and to bring me more fully into the world, because I’m giving my heart. I don’t know if that’s what Miranda meant, but these days, when I listen to Hamilton, that’s what I hear him asking.
                ‘If you’re so scared of becoming a fool–if you’re so scared of falling for a trick–then how will you ever fall in love?’

                “I wonder which of them would win, in a contest for worst father? Frankenstein, Rappaccini, Jekyll, or Moreau?”
                -Theodora Goss, The Strange Case of the Alchemist’s Daughter

                When I was thirteen I wrote what I was pretty sure was my magnum opus. Well, my parvum opus, maybe—it was fourteen pages long. But it seemed like the first step of something much longer, and it was cool. So cool. Mark, the main character, was so cool. I showed it to my friend. She read it and said, “That’s sad.”
                I was confused.
                Mark was so cool. In the beginning he was walking through a city, and then there was this knife fight, and he was all like, “Yeah, knife fight, I can handle that,” except he didn’t even say that, he didn’t say anything, he just saved this person and then walked away and sterilized the wound on his ribs with whiskey before drinking some. Of the whiskey, not the wound or the blood or anything. I didn’t like vampires, even then. I pointed out all that to my friend, in case she had missed the cool, but she’d seen everything I pointed to.
                “It’s sad,” she repeated. “He’s so—trapped. So small. There’s so much more he could be.”
                And, of course, she was right. Mark was my James Bond knock-off, my tough-guy cliché of insecurity and emotional confusion swept away by a good jawline, a good leather jacket, and the promise of nothing—no vulnerability, no hurt, no heart—inside. Luckily I really liked and respected my friend, so I grumbled a bit, and held on to my Mark. And started looking past him.
                There’s a Thing where villains often end up heroes. I think there’s something good in that—in a world of strict expectations and forced perspectives, villains can give us the why-nots, the could-bes, the shadow. A sterilized garden doesn’t grow much. Then there are heroes who end up being villains. I’ve talked with boys who idolize DiCaprio’s character in The Wolf of Wall Street. And why not? They look at him, and they see smart, handsome, successful, wealthy—everything you’re supposed to be. He does whatever he wants. Isn’t that what a good life means?
                Well, no. It’s not. But when we have heroes who say it is, we start to listen. Look around at all the heroes (or villains) who seem so cool, so powerful and mysterious and passionate, and who don’t have any thought for the people—the friends, the spouses, the children—around them. Where are the others? Where’s the ubermensch who’s great, not because of what he takes, but because of what he gives and shares?
                In the original stories, Sherlock Holmes (who appears in Goss’s book, too) goes through life saving the day and stepping on the people around him. He gets away with it because he’s brilliant. His disregard for others’ emotions is almost portrayed as part of his brilliance. Goss’s Holmes sees deeply, too, but he’s not as invincible, and he cares when he’s hurt someone. I like that. I suppose I want to read more stories named for people who, instead of twisting the world for themselves, tend to it for their children.

                “I believed that [feelings were unmanly], especially complicated feelings. I didn’t admit to them. I hardly knew I had them.” -Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life

                “You don’t have to be a slave to those experiences if you can find a way to process the emotions.”
                -André Guttfreund, discussing the film Cachada and how we interact with old pain

                I keep hearing how emotions “get in the way” of our “rational mind:” how they trip us up on the way toward what “makes sense.” The more I look at myself and the people around me, the less I think that’s true. Sure, sometimes my feelings start pulling me apart. They’re like roots, working their way into the foundation of this life and mind I’ve made. They always seem to find my cracks. Then again, all that usually happens when I’ve been ignoring or denying them. When I pay attention, my emotions are also the roots that grow my forest, my garden, that give me the wood I build with.
                Sometimes I don’t know what I’m feeling. I’ve gone months, maybe even years, not sure if I’m angry or sad, astonished or tense or serene or indolent or quiescent. (All those are different). It’s in those times, the times that I’m farthest from my own emotions, that I’m most frustrated by them. It’s in those times that I start trying to tie them up or push them away or have Tony do something irreversible to them down at the docks. I also start lashing out: when I don’t know what pain I’m feeling, when I don’t know what I need, I have an urge to strike back at anything and take everything.
                In the last few months I’ve spent more time feeling through what I’m feeling. That’s meant some hurt, and a lot of confusion; some silliness, and a lot of energy. As I spend more time in this garden, I believe, more and more, that all the plants here are sharing something. I don’t want to miss out on the pear because I’ve only noticed the prickles. I don’t want to chew on the tea leaves and decide they’re not good for anything. Maybe uncertainty helps with my curiosity. Maybe hopelessness is only the rotting fruit of wanting to help, and I can learn to harvest a little sooner. Maybe I can brew hurt into an understanding of what it’s like to be hurt, and that can help make me kind.
                 The first time I saw artichokes growing, I thought, “The first person to eat one of those must’ve been really hungry.” Maybe they were just paying attention to their feelings, even the complicated ones. I can’t eat everything the same way. I can’t just keep chewing the pointy bits. But I can learn to fillet puffer fish and soak cassava and steep tea, and scrape my teeth over the inside of an artichoke’s petals.

Tell all the truth but tell it slant —
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind —
                -Emily Dickinson

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it’s always ourselves we find in the sea
                -e. e. cummings

                I’ve heard the first part, the strategy, quoted again and again–but almost everyone I’ve ever heard stops before Dickinson explains why we should “tell it slant.” And the why is the most powerful part.
                If you had told me, during my first week in Oklahoma, that I would stay here six years, I would’ve said “No way.” I might have even become a little more resistant to the idea, because it would’ve felt so foreign. If you would have told me, the first time I talked to someone, that I would fall deeply, openly in love with her, in love like I hadn’t imagined–well, I wouldn’t have been able to imagine it. There weren’t roots, yet, to hold up the flowers and the leaves. In high school and college plenty of people did tell me that I’d be a good teacher, and I pushed back against every one. I’m not saying that teaching, or loving, or living in Oklahoma were the only path I could’ve walked. I don’t think they were. But I found those paths slowly, gradually, while my eyes adjusted.
                Too often I’m in a hurry, and in hurrying, I hurry by. I hurry by the puddles and the petals, the questions and the bits of coral on the beach. Maybe finding ourselves is often a matter of losing our way, losing our yous and mes, until we’re spun around enough to start seeing what’s here. So I want to slow down. I don’t need answers now. I’ll try not to mind if the mountains don’t seem to be getting closer, no matter how long I walk. I’ll try to keep tottering along through slanted rooms, playing with the pieces I find, wondering at the changes larger than I yet understand. Day by day, all this is dazzling. It’s wonderful. And it’s helping me to see.

“Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky…”

“That is not it at all,
That is not what I meant, at all.”
                -T. S. Eliot

                A friend died a few days ago. His name was Rishi. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do after someone’s death–“feel your feelings,” someone said. It’s good advice. I’m trying. I’ve been on several long walks. Rishi and I were part of a little group that used to walk together, discussing poetry and the way the fields blow in the wind. Which is also poetry, he said. It was on one of those walks that Rishi told me to go read T. S. Eliot again. I’d never liked Eliot that much. I’d always felt like I didn’t understand him. But Rishi told me to listen again, and that conversation, those walks, come back to me now.
                I still don’t understand. Perhaps that’s the point? I don’t understand how to say goodbye to Rishi, or what to say to some of his other friends as we mourn and remember him. Still, though, his memory makes me smile. In a little group we walked out through old hills, touching the rocks, watching the wind. Let us go then you and I. We wandered along through what we didn’t understand. I’m glad for that.
                A few weeks ago, a high school senior asked how you stay in touch with friends once you’ve moved away. I told him I didn’t know. I’ve tried it: sometimes it’s worked, sometime it hasn’t. This student and I talked for a while longer, and stumbled across this: perhaps you just remember that you want to stay in touch. You keep the intention, you return it, and though that isn’t a path, it’s a view towards where you’re headed.
                The group that Rishi and I walked with didn’t ever get where it was going. There wasn’t a place we were going. We found paths, and left them. Like our feet, our ideas found possibilities, and followed them, and turned aside to something new. And perhaps all of that was as it should be. That is not it at all…the path was never exactly right, but we were out, looking for it, and sharing the confusing, happy work of wondering along.
                None of this is what I meant to say. I don’t know what I meant to say. But I think Rishi would understand that, and might say that the important part wasn’t the path we’d walked but our attempt to walk it with an open heart.
                Thank you, Rishi.

“Dormammu: You will never win.
Doctor Strange: No. But I can lose. Again. And again. And again. And again, forever.”
–Doctor Strange (2016)

                We all pick our heroes, and there are different heroes to pick. Hercules is a hero because he’s strong. Odysseus is a hero because he’s clever. Moana is a hero because she recognizes Te Fiti the loving through the flames of hurt Te Kā (“They have stolen the heart from inside you / But this does not define you / This is not who you are / I Know who you are”). In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, John Wayne is a hero because he’s violent enough to kill the bad guy, and Jimmy Stewart is a hero because he’s idealistic enough to resist violence. (If that doesn’t say something about how America likes to imagine itself, I don’t know what does). In Gaiman’s Neverwhere, Richard Mayhew is a hero because he’s kind. In the movie, Wonder Woman is a hero because she won’t give in to hate or apathy, even when Ares taunts her with humanity’s flaws. She keeps loving.
                Doctor Strange is a hero because he’s clever (like Odysseus) and because, at the end of the day, he’s willing to lose. He’s willing to lose and lose and lose, lose until Dormammu is tired of hurting him, and agrees to leave everyone behind Doctor Strange alone. (That’s a story we’ve seen before: one of my favorite versions is Tyr’s part in the myth, “The Binding of Fenrir.” Ask me about it sometime, and I’d love to tell you). Our society is so interested in “winners.” Some of those winners “sacrifice themselves”  for the final step, but they still win. Strange’s sacrifice (“sacrifice,” originally “to make sacred”) is different: he’s choosing a path where he gets hurt, where he loses, again and again, because that’s the best thing he can do for the world.
                Lately I’ve been feeling more hopeful than I was feeling when I saw Doctor Strange, so I’ve been thinking more about Moana’s open eyes. I suppose we all choose our heroes, day by day; we choose who to look up to, and that’s who we grow toward. What about your hero, then? What’s their superpower?

                “no one is a stranger, this whole world is your home.” -Franz Wright, “Promise”

                A week ago, in response to a student’s poem, I found myself asking: “This makes it sound like you think there’s only one place you’re supposed to be, one good outcome, one right path. Is that true?” She answered quickly: “Yes.” I don’t know if she kept thinking about that, but I did, and yesterday we talked it over.
                I know I’ve felt like she did: I’ve felt like living and working and growing up were a single tightrope, and if I messed up, if I fell, I’d never get back to where I was, let alone to where I was going. Sometimes, instead, life’s felt more like a field–I can walk here, or there, or lie down, or listen, or double back, and there’s always ground beneath me. My student saw those two images, too: the tightrope and the field. As we talked it over, she said she wanted to practice seeing the field more often.
                Back when I was choosing what college to attend, I thought I had to make the right decision, and I thought there was only one of those. Then my brother said: “You did the work to find interesting doors, and now you’re lucky enough that some of them are open. You choose which one to walk through.” If all goes as planned, next week’s Uproar will be my last before I move away from Oklahoma City. There are lots of quotes about leaving (“Tomorrow to fresh woods”), but I find myself thinking more about Franz Wright. Maybe moving isn’t the same as leaving. Maybe moving isn’t going off to walk alone through a disconnected crowd. Maybe it’s going to another place where I live. Maybe it’s almost like going back, even if it’s going to someplace I’ve never been. Wherever I’ve walked there’s someone to meet. Wherever I’ve stepped, there’s ground or rock or water beneath me.
                No one is a stranger, this whole world is your home.

                “A saying from the area of Chinese medicine would be appropriate to mention here: ‘One disease, long life; no disease, short life.’ […] Once you face and understand your limitations, you can work with them, instead of having them work against you and get in your way, which is what they do when you ignore them, whether you realize it or not.”
                -Benjamin Hoff, The Tao of Pooh

                I’ve been diagnosed with piriformis syndrome, and it’s wonderful. I mean, okay, the actual having of it is a bit of a pain: a little pear-shaped (hear the latin? Piriformis?) muscle in my butt is too tight and inflamed, so it rubs against my sciatic nerve, and ouch. But still, it’s wonderful. Because as far as I can tell, I got my piriformis in a bunch by slouching at my desk, hanging on muscles instead of supported by bones, and carrying my backpack on one shoulder, and stressing so much at work that I stopped doing other things. You know, like walking. Like moving through the trees near my house, and noticing that the junipers nearby have something called cedar apple rust (which is gross, and beautiful, in a weird way), and that once every year a happy crop of baby spiders sail through the sky on silk strings, land in fields, and leave a world webbed with tracing light. And there are foxes. And friends, sometimes, to go walking with.
                By the way, the spiders fly by using electric fields.
                “One disease, long life; no disease, short life.” I’m a little uncomfortable learning about Taoism from someone named Benjamin Hoff, but all the same, ever since I read that line it just makes sense. I think I might well have gone on obsessing about work and forgetting to move for weeks at a time if a little pear-shaped muscle hadn’t have started saying ow. But it did. Now, mostly, I remember to walk, and when I don’t, there’s a building ache that says go do that. And then I realize that the ground is thick with today’s rain.
                Perhaps being hurt, being imperfect, being limited isn’t so bad. If I understand my anatomy (and I don’t, really, except in as much as a certain piriformis is explaining it to me), it’s the rigidity of bones and the pull of muscles that lets a body move. Or to put it another way: when he was teaching us to write poetry, Richard Wilbur said that a poetic form would be a cage when we started. And then, at some point, the cage would become a scaffolding in which we could build.
                Look at that (says Hoff, or Pooh): we all come with our own cages, our own bars beyond which we cannot go. And those bars can be the ladders we climb.