Thursday
9 February 2017

— sunshine snow shower

Good Morning All,

Today’s birthday poet is Amy Lowell, who brings to mind one of my most indelible high school memories. My 11th grade teacher, Miss Krastin, introduced Lowell to me in a most dramatic fashion. I am pretty sure I’ve mentioned Miss Krastin before now. My best teacher ever.  She’d been President of the Henry Thoreau Society, had sold essays to national magazines, drove a Corvette, and reputedly kept twenty-three cats in her gothic house on the hill that overlooked the park. Like all people who lived for beauty, there was sometimes about her eyes a look of not so quiet desperation. Some winter dawns, when I’d gone out to try to walk off some of the angst of being seventeen, I’d see her up on the ice in her blue cape, a solitary skater, leaning in as she circled the pond’s perimeter, straight arms pumping, the long, glinting blades of her racers, the steel against ice making that sound which reminded me of guitarists sliding calloused fingertips along the base string.

Because of my pathological shyness in high school, most teachers left me alone. Not Miss Krastin. One day in the spring of 1963, she told me--despite or because of that shyness--to stand beside my desk and read aloud the poem beginning on page 163 in our readers. It had been Amy Lowell’s Patterns. To this day, I still know the opening lines: “I walk down the garden paths, / And all the daffodils / Are blowing, and the bright blue squills. / I walk down the patterned garden-paths / In my stiff, brocaded gown.”

As I read, at first falteringly and with a humiliating quaver in my voice because of my intense discomfort when speaking in front of others, of having to suffer my stupid voice bouncing off my own eardrums as it must have been bouncing off the eardrums of everyone in the class, I’d wondered why she was making me do this. She must have known I was a loner at odds with much of the clique-driven, rah-rah world in which I found myself. Was there something in the poem I was supposed to be paying attention to, some private message, maybe?

And then one of the half dozen strangest moments of my life arrived. The poem opened its gates and invited me in. Nothing like that had happened to me before. All my nervous shyness disappeared. The rest of the class disappeared. Only Miss Krastin and I were there. Together we listened to my voice reading the unbearably sad poem spoken by a young woman in a garden in a stiff brocaded gown, wishing she were free of all the gown’s hoops and lace, as well as free from all the stiff patterns of correct social behavior, wishing that the soldier who was to be her husband were there to loose her from the gown, so that “I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths, / And he would stumble after, / Bewildered by my laughter.”

The young woman was there with us by then. Or we with her, as if our presence might provide her some sort of comfort. Miss Krastin and I listened to her imagining being married, her soldier catching her in the garden, but heard her finally now speaking of the morning’s letter hidden in her gown, bearing the news of her fiancé’s death, the poem ending: “For the man who should loose me is dead, / Fighting with the Duke in Flanders, / In a pattern called a war. / Christ! What are patterns for?”

I'd had tears in my eyes, Miss Krastin, as well. In the silence that had followed the final suspiration of my voice, I’d become aware of the rest of the class now visible again in their seats as if in tableau. It had seemed to me I now understood--perhaps correctly--why Miss Krastin had never married. It became clear to me that something extremely important had just occurred, that my voice in conjunction with the will of a teacher and the words of a dead poetess had created something powerful enough, beautiful enough, or whatever enough, to perpetuate a hush in that room that lasted another fifteen or twenty seconds until the bell rang its pattern and everyone returned with relief to the ordinary business of closing books and shuffling feet. I knew even as I closed my own book that I’d just had one of the hundred best moments of my life.

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron