When A Child Is Like A Villanelle

It's been a while. I hope you will forgive my dust.

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Three times this week I did not cry for you.

I will not see you again, child.

And so when I say three times this week I did not cry for you I mean three times I began this story to someone else, felt the choked weight welling at my chest—the silence fractures, I swallow, and three times this week I do not finish telling your story. I keep moving, and I do not fall apart.

I don’t know much about this boy, except that he is just a boy, and smart too. Suspended on the first day of high school for a fight and again throughout the year, he would appear in our freshman lit studies class for a few days every now and then, ace tests he’d missed half the lessons for, and then disappear again. Small, gentle, with black hair cut sharp, a quiet kid with diamond earrings and bad posture but graceful hands and intelligent eyes. Quiet can be dangerous when there are 29 kids in the class all wrangling to be loved or noticed.

And they all deserve it.

This kid loved patterns, had a knack for them, was intrigued when we studied sonnet forms, iambic pentameter and all that, stuff I personally always found sort of hopelessly dull. (Maybe not dull. Maybe just, a language I hadn’t mastered.) And this kid, my student, had mastered this language or would master it, I tell you he was smart.

On Tuesday morning, he—

Here is a sound I hate. Tuesday afternoon, as on so many afternoons before, another teacher, shook up about this too, but this way: shouting at the kids, Maybe this isn’t the place for you. In my head there is sometimes screaming NO DON’T TELL THIS DON’T TELL THIS TO ANYONE. This is the place for you. Please, stay. Wanting to grab these grammar exercises from their hands and tear them up and sit cross-legged on the floor and say: You. You you you tell me about you and what you need and how can I help you please make better choices?

No he did not die. Should I have told you that in the beginning? Nobody died on Tuesday. A boy was hit in the head with a lock, he had stitches and is back at school. And perhaps in the absence of what is called tragedy it will be all right if I tell you that it’s the other boy I’m grieving for, the one who somehow—the way we know and don’t know how—grabbed a metal lock off a locker and hit some other kid in the head with it. In Kite Runner, which we are reading for AP, the child narrator says: "I wondered how and when I'd become capable of causing this kind of pain."

So what I’m grieving for is that kid I was talking to Tuesday morning, so maybe it’s Tuesday morning I’m grieving for, those lost seconds with this kid I was getting caught up on an essay assignment about Romeo and Juliet, who got taken out of school in handcuffs at lunch. I never got to know him but I spoke to him this morning about Romeo and Juliet I looked him in the eyes and I tell you the boy’s a genius (THEY’RE ALL GENIUSES) and he’s being expelled, transferred ASAP, and what I’m grieving for is those eyes, not like a child but smart, and wondering if anyone—at this next and all the places after that catch kids when they fall—will have the time to make him notice it better than we I did.

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Post Script

This week we also read an Elizabeth Bishop poem entitled "One Art."

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

And in my clumsy way I try to guide my students to see in this poem the rare way form comes to life for me, the controlled grief, the way the logic of the line does something. The way disaster is written into the horizon with the first tercet of this villanelle. A difficult poem, one must pay attention to the time: "I shan't have lied." I ask if anyone has ever had someone in their lives they hadn't lost yet but were afraid they might. Nearly the whole class raises their hands. We keep (Write it!) We keep moving.


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The blue sketch I drew in late November, following my field visit to Orr High School, to remember a few of the students I’d met there.

Beneath, the opposite page from my sketchbook: the metal detectors and x-ray machines they pass through each day before class.