Spelling Lessons

 

Perhaps a spell is lifted in the slumberous news today:
Gabriel Garcia Marquez has passed away, and students gone and gifted

sent him, and cc’d me, a wistful wave good-bye.

The spell began December third, some thirteen years ago

with the laureate of Chicago, Gwendolyn Brooks, whom I had heard

in ’eighty-two, enchanting us anew. ‘Is she alive?’

a student asked—no Google yet to see—and I replied

‘I hope she hasn’t died. She’s old, for sure and awfully spry—I bet—’

the bell for passing rang, the lesson came to close.

Then later, on the nightly news, I saw the haunting face

of Gwendolyn, a smile of grace: indeed today, an erstwhile vivid muse…

That student would conclude ‘that’s how it sometimes goes.’

Belles lettres studied next and next lent opportune lifelines:

Dickens’ best and worst of times, renderings of Shakespeare texts,

Morrison, Munro, Ishiguro let literature run free

and handed off to Saramago, whose Blindness we pined

to see. Alas, we find we’re in a place we’d been ten years ago—

‘Is he alive?’ and Google now confirms the man to be

but lessons later, mockingly, the Nobel Portugese expired.

Well, he was old and tired—imagine teaching Plath when shockingly

she sealed her flat to take the leaking gas alone…

Havel’s plays—abstruse, absurd—were finally sinking

in by mid-year break, and thinking we could commandeer the new year,

Vaclav moled away in Prague, our common home.

Szymborska’s ‘View with a Grain of Sand’ slid in. We shared

the view and then prepared to wonder with her why and what and who

and, spellbound as we were, this poet left our world.

We hadn’t set things down, when Heaney, digging well

before the mid-term break expelled the chance to see him in our town

(as I had twice before, and relished every word):

“A four foot box, a foot for every year.” Mere inches in,

the school year would begin as the stubborn bogland spell took root.

We studied on—what could we do?—and so

we’re celebrating Easter now, with Lazarus and friends,

and as his curtailed century ends, and as his magic would allow,

we raise Remedios the Beauty… now, for Gabo.

Before your iPhones entered in, we swam in Solitude.

Ambivalent to verisimilitude, the novel failed to find its center

in millennials who had no qualms or queries

about a race condemned or exiled from the memory

of men—whose armory had no time for Macondos on the mend,

no clutter for vacation breaks… or centuries.

Still, we wore three covers out—one had Macondo

on a hill, an island in a Day-Glo Babel, jungle-clad, an anthill stout

and mad, and maybe Ben, my son, saw sheer

delight in that tableau. He painted one his own:

a house and homme and chestnut tree, a sun and moon to look below

and unenormous wings of bluebird flying o’er,

stirring breeze to beat the hurricane. Ben bade

the spell adieu—he drew in solitude a more enlivened place to be,

and when he’s old enough to read the tome,

I hope he’ll see his instinct led him from the start:

his and Gabo’s fleeting art as noble, humble, immaculate, distinct,

and fit for classes, yes—our common home.