Bio-Poetica

1.

The poem I wrote about him was to avenge you. She said to herself as the realization was crystallizing, like a perfect symphony, vibrating in her bones. The first line of her short story was now written. She finally felt anchored. This pleased her. It was her only pleasure.

“You’ve changed,” said Toby condescendingly-- hoping her usual anxiety and timidity would prompt her to get up and go away.

He crossed his long legs. The creases of his Oxford suggested that he had slept in it, but it was a deliberate unkemptness. A calculated unselfconsciousness. She’d forgotten that she was not alone, sitting in the little circle of Adirondack chairs the senior parents had purchased for the school only one week ago.

“I’m not a shiny, new penny anymore," she said to him without further explanation. I’m not the new, annoying -too friendly- older teacher anymore...from another era-- a more interpersonal and intimate time when people were given opportunities to develop patience and less accustomed to instant gratification...a time when people appreciated-- if they didn't fully comprehend-- the process of unfolding a mystery. Now, there were no mysteries. Only blatant intelligence, or blatant sexuality, or blatant ignorance, she thought to herself.

"I'm not a little glint of blind in the eye," she finally said, after he had spent a good two minutes trying to look like he wasn't at all thinking about what she had meant by the penny remark. Her voice was smooth as a boiled egg. She’d regained it during the last week of classes. Her first year of teaching was over. She’d made it through. The dysfunction of boarding school life had not driven her away this time. He laughed lightly. He didn’t get what she meant by the penny remark. He didn’t really want to know what she meant. He was twenty-five and very preoccupied with keeping his subscription to The New Yorker up-to-date and skulking around campus in places where there were no sidewalks or other commonly used paths.

Typical, she thought when she caught herself paying attention to his inattentions. She was forty-three and still capable of being hurt by red-faced twenty-somethings in the year two thousand and nine. She still held--a sometimes admirable resiliency- sometimes foolish naiveté about human beings and their capacity for conversing intimately with anyone they weren’t screwing or working on screwing-- or networking-- the emotional investment nearly identical. If they aren’t interested, they assume you are. She smiled at the thought and wondered if she wouldn’t like to toy with him.

“You never know how neglected you are until someone pays attention to you,” she said softly, her jaw set and her face squared to his.

She amused herself by watching him obviously wanting to bolt, not doing so, and being a little puzzled as to why.

2.

The students at the prep school where she is a teacher use the word ‘indeed’ like cologne. She thinks that they think it makes their Mensa scores magically appear on their foreheads when they say it: “Indeed, the weather is gloomy.” “Indeed.” When she asks them if they have studied for her tests.

3.

"Have I ever told you that--" She couldn't think of anything pure or distilled to say to the family's three dogs. She had a sudden fear that if she told them she envied them, she'd come back as a mistreated pet in her next life--- "that, I have nothing important to say?" She finally managed. It was just after noon. All the reports had been entered into the database. When she had left campus, it was completely still. They looked at her: the beagle, the terrier mix, the Australian-collie-? mix- all adopted from various rescue centers over various years. When she was home alone, they would follow her everywhere: the bathroom, the bedroom, to the window as she pulled out of the driveway. They stood quietly and watched her, waiting. The refrigerator's hum was the only sound in the house. She always became exhausted and anxious.

Everything cried out for attention when she was home alone. The dogs' silent, round eyes, the dusty rugs, the cobwebs tufting in the corners. Trapped bees and lightening bugs complained against the screens of the enclosed porch: all of their magic passwords tumbling like lists out of an instinct unprepared for Man. She could hear them from the upstairs bathroom. She kept a glass and a stiff postcard from the opera house near the sliding back door. She would slowly corner the flying creatures, gently cup them, slide the paper under the glass and free them into June. If only it was that easy to keep my tomato plants alive with all this rain, she thought. The rain had been falling for three weeks straight already. And then Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on the same day.

"They go in threes," she said to the dogs as they watched the news on the little TV in the sitting room. And then she remembered Ed McMahon, who had died a few days before. "That's three," she sighed, and went out onto the front lawn. She sat down in the yard. It was very noisy with birdsong. One bird in particular called three identical notes over and over. It reminded her of what a songbird would sound like if it were trying to cough something up: tew-tew-tew, tew-tew- tew, over and over the bird called in sets of three. It haunted her like a squeaky swinging door forewarning of a gathering storm. It did not occur to her that the theme of things coming in three's was beginning to form.

She suddenly fixed on the memory of a super band from the sixties and seventies, The Fruit Bats; how their lead song writer, a kind of a guru who had had a dream about bantams.  He wrote a song about it called "Bantam Dream" that became a cult hit. So much so that people started breeding Bantams; naming their children Bantam, and conspiring about bantam chickens being channels to an alternate universe.  He later married a woman from Bangkok and left the band. His wife was vilified for the rest of her life.