Before the Psalm

after Margaret Ann Silver

Read Margaret’s poem here.

1. Emily

In a used bookstore across from the University of Virginia on a rainy Sunday afternoon I pick up White Heat, a story about the friendship between Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. “Poets unfix things,” the author tells me in her introduction and I buy the book immediately. I don’t know, or I don’t know how to say what the phrase means but somewhere inside me where I feel words but can’t speak them, I know. Somewhere inside me, something sings.

2. Attrition

“You are giving them busy work,” the department chair tells me, and then uses the word “attrition.” He suggests this is the experience I’m giving the students when I have them read and annotate texts. I don’t know what attrition means so I look it up while he continues to tell me about “these types of kids.” “The action or process of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of someone or something through sustained attack or pressure.”

He tells me to stop giving them mentor texts. “It frustrates them,” he says.

Yesterday, I showed a student who will only write poetry, Amanda Gorman’s “The Hill We Climb.” This student of mine is angry and sad beyond words, and she has often stuck around after class to tell me why. Writing poetry is her way of speaking her experience, but writing it exhausts her. I tell her I understand. She didn’t think poetry was enough, so I showed her Amanda Gorman reading her poem at the Presidential Inauguration.

“I didn’t know you could do that,” she said.

“You can do that,” I said.

What’s the opposite of attrition?

3. Caged

Another student, this one has been in prison, and back in school now. He’s used to writing on paper and doesn’t want to use the computer. “Can’t I just hand you my assignments?” he asks, pleads, really. I tell him of course. I’m a paper person, too.

In his class, we are beginning personal narratives and I start them out small. We study 100 word essays pulled from the New York Times. All of them have to do with love: crushes, love of a sport, love for a country, love for parents. It is so fun analyzing each story, so fun showing them all the love there is to write about.

I set them loose and they write - and want to share - what they wrote: late night “easy vibe” conversations, walking away from soccer, break-ups that taught them about strength, birthday celebrations after funerals.

“Pack up,” my student writes. “Already done!” he tells the guard. “I was finally being released,” he writes. He tells us he trotted towards his mama with a warm smile. He tells us she takes him straight home. He tells us he reflects on the traumatic events of the last few years as he looks out the window. He tells us he sees his motorcycle and decides to crank it up. “Helmet on….clutch in….freedom.”

4. Dragon

One of the security guards on campus stops by my office most days and tells me about how things were and what he really means is how he thinks they ought to be now. He does not pick up on my courtesy laugh.

The student who I introduced Amanda Gorman to stops by sometimes, too. Sometimes we talk about what’s going on in her life. Sometimes she reads me her poetry.

“She’s a nice girl,” the security guard says on a day she pops in when he is there. “But,” he continues and I feel my neck and cheeks heat up. The heat spreads to my shoulders and down my arms. It swirls in my torso. I want the heat to make me a dragon. If it did, I would spread my wings, flex my talons while smoke flies from my nostrils. “You have no idea the horrors she has lived through,” I would say. “You haven’t a clue about the strength it has taken her to be where she is.” I want to become something he is terrified of.

If I were a dragon, I would breathe fire as I screamed, “Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” But I am not. I am a middle-aged woman who presents nice.

5. Garbage

They’re everywhere, these guys who think they can say and do whatever they please. They mean no harm but they cause it anyway. Like the guy who is not my husband, who shimmies up to me on my couch, who calls me “sweetheart,” and puts his arm around me. In my house. Again, I want to become a dragon. I want to do fiery, violent things but this is a party and I am nice. I am sparkly. I do not cause problems. I do not unfix things. No attrition.

We gather in the kitchen at the end of the night and I sit on the counter as far away from him as I can and look at my hands while people talk and laugh. Above our garbage can is a framing of Joshua 1:9: “Be strong and courageous for the Lord your God goes with you wherever you go.” What about whatever I become? Will You follow me when I’m a dragon? What if my scales become too hard? What if my fire hurts the wrong people? Will You still go where I go? Will you keep my underbelly soft?

6. Morning

The dog jumps on our bed and that is how we wake up, me and Jesse. He rolls over and says he’s going to take her for a walk. Corby hears “walk,” and dashes downstairs to the front door.

“Want company?” I ask, tossing off the covers and swinging my legs off the side of the bed.

“Sure,” he says.

The morning is bright and we don’t need hats and gloves. Jesse says it smells like Spring and I tell him I knew it was on its way last week because I heard birds one morning when I was scraping ice off the car.

“It’s funny they know before it’s actually here,” I tell him.

And how do they know? When everything is dark and slick ice, jagged ice, ice everywhere threatens to break all of us into pieces, how do the birds know something else is coming? Or is this faith? Some kind of visceral hope bubbling inside of them that all the things with wings know to do is sing?