First Course In Turbulence

Faculty Summary Report

Faculty Summary Report I’m afraid they will know how powerless I am but it is my job to show them drawings from the asylums, to explain how a machine gun works, all the functions of firing and loading done by the gun itself. And they sit there in waxed hair and crop tops lip-syncing sitcom jingles in a whirl of thought oppressed, high on the blithe ethereal sky wondering if I was ever young. But then Tania writes her poem rushing to class and turns it in on a napkin and it’s the best she’s ever done and she’ll never be able to do it again. And Mike tells Viola to make her last line the first and the first the last then that’s her best poem so far. And in protest of an assignment, Jennifer just copies stuff about the physiology of an erection from her nursing text and that’s her best poem ever, but she feels she didn’t even write it so she turns in a poem about a plane wreck but no one can tell it’s about a plane wreck. Doug writes only about God and none of his poems are ever any good which seems unfair. Two students who live together say the appearance of Ernesto in their poems 46 the same week is an accident. Everyone wants to know who Ernesto is but he isn’t anyone then Tim suddenly gets combative and misses a class and does nothing the rest of the semester except dye his hair and write a poem in the voice of Ernesto who seems stuck somewhere in a greenhouse/discotheque/racecar. Ping ping go the dancers, ding ching the pistons, kaboom the clouds but what is it the heart goes? Are we trying to get the tangible to shimmer or the intangible shimmer to be like wet grass to push our faces in? Just try being a window and not taking a hammer to yourself. Even a harp has obligations. When asked how long you should practice, Robert Fripp said eight hours a day and when asked how people with jobs and lives could do that said some people can practice eight hours in fifteen minutes, others it takes years. Some people think it’s important to count and they’re the ones mostly in control. Some people think it’s important to talk on the radio. To address the situations of the globe. One poison is so powerful, a single drop on your finger will kill you in less than an hour, then kill the people who come to pick you up. I guess it soaks in 47 then back out. Last night, I dreamed I was at a mushy desk surrounded by bales of student poems. It was my fault my love had been transformed into a giant paperclip. My fault Apollinaire, his head in bandages and dying, trembles in the feverish victory cries rising from the street. The war is over but one brain hemisphere thinks the cries are for him, one thinks it’s not victory at all. The first thing I always say is you have to pay attention to your surroundings. To the car with a canoe strapped to its roof idling in front of a stone house with an immense white door. To the trail in the dew where something was dragged then taken into the air. 48 ...