School starts tomorrow for my 6th grader, Friday for my 10th grader. Summer winds to an end. There is a chill in the air this morning, and my thoughts are turning to firewood. Outside a mourning dove is wailing its dull wail, a pileated woodpecker is laughing its loon-laugh. I should get dressed and go feed the barn animals, but I'm idling here still, thinking about the first day of school and how I can exactly remember the tremble in my gut on those first-day mornings: walking in jittery circles in the street sand; staring self-consciously and with some anxiety at my new shoes, as the school bus choked around the corner.

The Master

Dawn Potter

Leo’s eleven, but he still can’t write “Leo.”

He throws a pencil at me.

“You write the poem,” he says.

He frowns and leans back in his chair

 

and shuts his eyes.

In the flat autumn light, his glasses

shed a watery glow. His freckles tremble.

Leo always likes to keep me waiting.

 

After a minute he growls,

“Big heifers in the corn again,

And them horses

Is hungry.”

 

After a minute he snarls,

“Coyote snitched the rawhide.

Grab a gun and blast him,

Then skin him up.”

 

Twenty other kids breathe hard,

scribble, and erase. Danyell chews

on the end of a pen and sighs gustily.

“Can I make this up?” she complains.

 

Leo slouches and crosses his arms

over his bony ribs.  He opens his eyes

and smiles in a superior manner.

In his view, imagination sucks.

 

What matters in a poem

is you tell it like it happened

but you leave out the crap.

He jerks his chin up,

 

looks me over, slitty-eyed.  He says,

“I do something I do it right!”

When that bell screams,

he’s number one out the door.

[forthcoming in How the Crimes Happened (CavanKerry Press, 2010)].