about first loves

I had this amazing English teacher in high school.  Many people didn't like her, because she was strict and strange and seemed to pick favorites.  She wasn't perfect, but she was one of those teachers who did for me what teachers should do -- she brought me face to face with my passion.

Sitting in her class, I unwrapped language the way a child may unwrap a present on Christmas morning, with an eagerness she spurred on and coached.  In her classroom, I read some of the books that are still my favorites today, and I sat with her and talked about their meaning and significance to my life, and about the power of writing - not just the goodness of it for my soul, but the power of it in the world.

For some reason, I was thinking of her today.  I thought about one of the first poems I read in her class - "Song of Myself" by Whitman.  Reading that poem felt like falling in love.  Its lines sometimes come to me when I'm walking down the street with my grocery bags.  It awakened a love in my that has stayed.

And so, I wrote a poem.  It's a poem about that poem and also a poem, I think, about first loves, how they awaken in you a vastness so present and beautiful and lasting that they deserve to be celebrated.

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Every Atom

“…Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.” – Whitman, “Song of Myself”

I wielded large, airless anthologies

over to her table in the library,

like a little doe pointing to lines

have you read these words?

because I could not believe them to exist

in a room in my high school, or in any

room in any small part

of this world.

She smiled silently, leaving

me alone to uncover

what those words undid

inside of me.

With first love I was

champagne bubbles and butterflies

on orange carpet, in a stale

corridor down from the art

wing, where I read for millenniums:

            “And what I assume you shall assume,

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”

over and over, amazed at language,

amazed at feeling, not noticing

how that line put my fingertips

at the cusp of the cliff of the meaning

of those words:

            before the feeling of falling,

            of disparity with my bones,

            of wanting to weld and give them

            to someone else,

            my fingers

            not yet surrendered to the truth

            of being loved as much now as ever.