And now Alone means something new

A story-poem with an unexpected sound track

This kid is not me. I can tell by how they wear their jeans that this kid is cooler than I was or ever will be. Photo by Anton Savinov on Unsplash

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I have no plans to write a memoir, in prose or in verse. The story of my life doesn’t come with much of a narrative “hook,” and the uneasy relationship I have with my memories is best explored in my journal or in therapy.

Certainly, though, many of my poems describe moments from my own life, even when I’m present in the moment simply as an observer. And every now and then a moment from decades ago will pop up and say, “Hey, remember when this happened? Write about it.” So I do.

[Another slightly croaky voiceover; the bronchitis that was starting up last week is still working itself out. This too shall pass, and I don’t think it distracts a lot from the poem.]

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SPECIAL EDUCATION                                                     2024


You are ten going on eleven, and the things 
that you like best at school happen outside your classroom.

First best, your hour a day, three days a week,
in Special Education class, where -- having blazed
through every lesson plan in Reading for your grade --
you volunteer now as a student helper
to Mrs. Hartzell, busy in one cramped half
of the thin-walled prefab where she leads  
the dozen youngest through their lessons,
while Mr. Hartzell takes the older class next door.
The pair of them, she thin and drab and cheerful,
he egg-shaped, combed-over, deeply calm; 
the Spesh Ed kids themselves, scorned by your classmates
as you are scorned for different reasons, 
their open hearts and faces, how they brighten
when they see you, welcome you among them 
as you are welcomed to no other room 
in your ten-going-on-eleven life. The way
time slows, each morning, while your study partner
grapples again with the day’s words and sums;
delight in progress, sweet slow patience turning
from one page to the next, and back, and on.

Another best, coming to school on Saturdays
to ride your bike, sometimes with neighbor kids,
alone most often. A short pull up along
an asphalt road (your town is short on sidewalks,
blank on bike lanes) to the still-new Elementary, 
a 1960s California classic, classroom clusters
enswirled, linked each to next, by covered sidewalks
luxuriantly smooth, cleverly cornered; 
a zoomish slope down to the blacktopped playground
to steer around the dodgeball circles, then back up
 to shaded fresh-air hallways, back into the maze
to which you have proved all solutions, back to the spin
of rusted pedals fleet to outride echoes, ghosts
of taunts and jeers alive behind blank classroom doors.

Then the day another voice, unknown and summoning,
beckons through weekend quiet. You point your front wheel
in pursuit, brake and nudge the kickstand down
outside the Spesh Ed classroom, where the strangest sound --
a drone? a tune? -- comes humming through thin walls.
Tiptoe on sidewalk as on a creaking floor,
you steal up to the window, gaze in awe
at egg-shaped Mr. Hartzell striding up and down
his stuffy classroom, the bagpipe in his arms
seizing his grip and breath, its shape and voice
charging the afternoon with Highland war-cries.

A moment long, in mute surprise, you stand 
stock-still, agape, and then -- since any kid alone 
is breaking rules, since you are spying 
on a grown-up -- fear shoves you, sends you 
scuttling for your bike. Away you ride, 
played off by pipes, adrenaline and wonder 
drone through your blood while questions 
skirl like wild tunes in your brain.
Why not at home? Because his wife complains?
How Scottish is he, does he wear a kilt 
sometimes, march in parades? And underneath
the questions, mute half-understanding:
this grown-up comes to school alone, as you do,
comes here to play -- he on his pipes, 
you on your bike, he by himself 
and you by yours; the two of you alike, 
apart, somehow together -- and now Alone
means something new. The day’s vocabulary lesson, 
half-understood, remembered down the years
like sweet slow patience, shaded silken sidewalks,
like drones and tunes, the dim imagined shape
of a lone piper on a distant hillside.

---

I spent two months taking this poem through one draft after another. Narrative poems like this are a huge challenge for me. At the heart of the poem — as with the present-tense ones — is a moment that shines out for some reason. Great, and now: how much history and geography do you need to wrap around the moment, so that a reader can enter into it in something like the same way you did? Have you over-explained this, have you said enough about that? Which details are essential, which are distractions? If you understand, now, why the moment kept such a shine in your memory for so long, how much can you say about the Why without sounding didactic and obvious?

That teacher, though, walking up and down his classroom in the grip of a bagpipe. That odd, solitary kid, staring at him through the window with her mouth open. Somebody had to write the moment down.