Divine Honors

Teaching, Hurt

Teaching, Hurt Bradshaw, Nebraska, near York, forty-eight miles the spring of the heart loud under its breast wild heart at its single lesson, spring of sterile apples, trees a pyramid of white spectacle overflowingbuttermilk at twilight, spring of buttermilk, the body's affairs, heart broken under its absent breast the beat so loud she fancies they can hear it thud in a room loud with her perfume's diversion. Spring teaching again, gone to the highway bysix, alone, fields ripening in some color she can't name. Bradshaw, Bradshaw, rhymes with bedsore, rhymes with bad law, lockjaw, she can't find a place to work without disturbing someone. At lunch the teacher names her boys twins, and an older. "It could be worse," she laughs out loud, delighted, and someone whispers yes, the first child has cancer in his brain. Into this mess, new life: week-old Peking ducks, and mallards, gray brown and plain, some with green heads you can't tell yet which is which, girl from boy; a Hamburg chick, sole survivor of the trip from Omaha, flat comb, wide tad feathers, an exotic; and Partridge Cochin, feathers down to their golden feet, colored like pheasants; twelve babies in aWheat Chex box small as first graders who make the circle work holding chicks onto their newspapers.The water dish 54 overflows onto the floor of the lunchroom where the kids make nests of their legs to sit watching and she hunches over them, hungry to see what they see, to see them. 55 ...