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To
Miss Alberta Love, My First Creative Writing Teacher
-
I
heard about you before I took your class–
- schoolboy
cuts about your elephantine legs
- and
arms, gargoyle face and straggle hair,
- the
students who'd locked you in a closet.
-
- First
day of 10th grade you told us to write admit slips, words
- we'd
write anonymously everyday to admit something
- about
ourselves which was true, read aloud by you.
- My
first admit slip was "I "cry, I sigh, I lie, then...I
die."
-
- which
admitted to nothing except pretentious gas and
- because
I didn't know the meaning of anonymous, I signed
- my
slip, expecting you'd read my name. You didn't and the class
- didn't
hush or applaud the crepuscular genius of my words.
-
- Fifty
years later, here's my admit slip, Miss Love:
- I
admit to grief over keeping words I should have spoken
- when
they tumbled as I tossed into troubled sleep. I admit
- to
squander and damage to others who believed more of me.
- I
admit to a belief that poetry calibrates loss and death
-
- and
something else: I admit that the way to approach
- the
Door of Open is to turn the knob, release the latch,
- see
what happens–even if what happens destroys
- what'
s happened–without sound, without words ;
- only
the latch that secures the lock inside the chest.
-
- I
admit that crepuscular means twilight and that twilight
- is
where I am now with the dark approaching softly,
- dressed
in purple that turns blue, then black, and finally,
- stars
that appear in the night whose light and source
- I
will not know or understand. This I learned from you.
-
- ––Your
Student, Bob McAllister, 2010
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