for Dean Young
Death happens and we all have to keep going.
Remember writing? I don’t. When my teacher died
I remembered his collection of embroidered shirts,
each thread a river to his heart. I remembered
his dance moves, each jerk of his arms
a line break. I remembered the way he ran
through town, faster, faster, though surely
his heart was already on the way to failing,
surely he was on his way to a new heart,
his feet hurrying the pavement. Let’s think about
eyeballs or crazy shapes. About Dadaism.
About Kenneth Koch. Let’s think about Keats,
whose manic highs and lows fascinated
my teacher, who my teacher even looked like!
Now that I’ve put an exclamation mark
in my poem, this is a real elegy to my teacher,
who I will never see again. This is a real elegy
to the landscape of soft rolling hills that edge
dramatically into limestone cliffs when they hit
the river. This is a real elegy for a small rock
painted with green swirls that somebody left
on my desk. I couldn’t see the edge of the cliff
or the river or the rock. I could only see
my teacher, at the front of the classroom
gesticulating wildly as he quoted Hopkins,
each quote an ecstasy, each movement
of his arms a splash of sprung verse,
and every time he pushed his glasses back
up his nose bridge—a little goodbye.
There, there are two people on a bridge,
on a land bridge at the edge of a river,
and one of them is stopping in the middle
and turning around to take a last look
at the trumpet vines blasting their blossoms
in the late August fog, and at the hills, and at us.
—Rebecca Lehmann
Rebecca Lehmann is the author of the poetry collections Ringer and Between the Crackups. Her work has appeared in the American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, NPR’s The Showdown, and other venues.
