Schools

All day they stream past, petitioners

for understanding, accolade, critique.

I read them all, a vast anthology

of jumbled genres on a common theme:

affliction. So I parse, interpret, scan.

I graph dysrhythmias, dysmetrias;

I eavesdrop on caesuras for unsaid

murmurs, gallops, rubs, snaps, flutters, clicks.

The perils of misreading harrow me—

beware the treacheries of metaphor!—

the elephant that squats upon a chest

is not a burning heart or waterbrash.

Just take the imagists. Their heads explode.

St Elmo's fire flashdances on their limbs.

They float, they swim. Knives twist within their flesh.

They're ball-and-chained by lead, filled with concrete.

Butterflies inhabit them. Their pipes

are wrong, and clogged. Their systems freeze and crash.

Invaded, they resist; defenses fail.

What they need, they think, is you to flush

it out of them, whatever it is, doc.

The formalists present minutiae,

in alphabetical enjambed iambs—

pentameter's ten digits, five lub-dubs—

from acne, backpain, catarrh, dandruff, eye-

strain, flatfoot, gas pains, hangnail, itchiness,

the jitters, kinks, lethargies, migraines, nose-

bleeds, obstipation, panics, queasy retch-

ings, styes and tremors, ulcers, vertigo,

to wandering womb, xerosis, yaws and zits.

Free versers, on the other hand, wax Walt

Whitmanic: their barbaric yawps celebrate and sing

incantatory songs of themselves, songs

of the breath as it wheezes and rales through them,

the short breath and long breath, the breath that is moist or dry,

songs of the blood, the thick- and thinness of it, its heat, its turbulence,

songs of the gut, its rippling coils, the dark burden of its secret indulgences,

songs of the muscled limb, inflamed with toil or the languid thrash of love.

Didacticists, of course, will always add

their theories of omission or commission:

slept in a draft, got their feet wet, caught a chill,

forgot their overshoes and oversoul,

ate too little roughage, too much ham,

should have pumped less iron or pumped more,

Mea culpa, meus morbus they intone,

certain you'll absolve them back to health.

Narrativists enshrine a fleeting pain

within an epic of chronology

I woke at six—I'm a morning person—

brushed my teeth, ate oatmeal with a pat

of low-fat margarine, the kind that has

the dancing turkey on the tub, on sale

for .99 at Johnnie's, by the time

you tune back in it's afternoon, the pain

has come and gone; they're vacuuming the rug,

the doorbell rings, the kettle's whistling,

you try to interrupt—where did you say

that pain was?—loquacity steamrolls on

through supper, TV, bedtime, dreams, alarm

clock going off at six. Try Tylenol,

you say, your fingers crossed. Call if it's worse.

Then there's the avant garde. The cutting edge.

The text Munchausens off the sizzling page.

Hypoglossalalia muscles in,

between John Cagey silences, the din

and Sturm of wild unsound, unsense.

O, there are stranger dysphasias, Wernicke,

than are dreamt of in your neurologies,

mutant L=A=N=G=U=A=G=Es that cacophone

far off the beaten geographic tongue,

where elephants explode and overshoes

fibrillate with longing—El Dorado,

Shangri-la, Eden, Heaven, Hell—you name it,

it's yours. And that's, of course, the joke. You nod.

You say, "I understand." You really don't.