Of the Education of Children

I was planted, a crop

not a boy but with headlong technique, everything in me telling

to be coursed through with water and emptiness

                                                          ★

The blank was worth tending

a matter of tight, small discretions

separating from youth like a bee

It's just silence

I've been talking about

Into hills I tried things I was made of

What was not in my memory, not math

yet patched all together

I required this armor

"wrestling with old champions body against body"               

                                           

                                                        ★

Scribbling down the solution

"by little light attacks"

A life is at odds and we solve it

a shadow itself

"Understanding makes profit of everything—arranges, acts, and

            reigns,"

gives knowledge out in a swan

Virtue wasn't a mountain, not a field

or was it me brooding

 

                                                        ★

"Too ill to instruct others,"

this awareness of slow moving and ditch

of the past of the subject

A few lumps on the ground like a book

"Mixing with men is wonderfully useful"

but hard practice

                                                     

                                                        ★

"For our boy, a closet, a garden, the table and bed, solitude,

company, morning and evening, all hours will be the same, all

places will be his study"

 

                                                        ★

He's in philosophy, and mingled

let him forgive it

I have been happy in rooms

Gambling with pocket, with babble

"he will not say his lesson as do it"

and the unit is character,

"repeated in actions"

                                                        ★

Rising to beg and confounding

I hear it now, in our ears