At the School for the Gifted
Yes, I wanted them to levitate.
Unfortunately, I hadn't a leg to stand on.
Cut-out camels plodded across the blackboard's high
sill. Yet the desert below refused to unfurl its
mica wings. When I asked them to try to remember,
to release a soap bubble from their marvelous arsenal
of wands, they resisted. They lined up, suspicious
in individual spotlights. The fountain inside
the scissored palm could only rise so high,
maybe just a trumpeted C. Which is high, but
not like those huge blue dreams that used to float by,
shot from cloud-atomizers, the original public breeze
on its back in the grass. Let's try to guess who
or what is being borne up by this caravan of thin-
skinned humps, a-bulge, inoculated? I tell you
every one has a rider, a crop. It's been done
this way for some time. If we pause here by the pillars
of sand, up to our poet-knees in anarchy, won't each
gulp of hoarded water from the toppled monument be
sweeter passed hand to hand in the sun-colored dipper?
Up to our thighs in it now, and spared what drills it-
self into the rock daily, so it can claim to know zero
after zero, and make that nothing into a sound like
silent bells, split parched hooves, plodding.
Copyright Credit: Carol Muske-Dukes, "At the School for the Gifted" from An Octave Above Thunder. Copyright © 1997 by Carol Muske-Dukes. Used by permission of Penguin Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
Source: An Octave Above Thunder (Penguin Books, 1997)