Iris’s tiredness is disappointment, or more troubling than that, a hunch she can’t even articulate at her desk, twenty stories above the Manhattan sidewalk, where the people below walk three times faster than they walk in Philadelphia. No, it is far too early to think dark things. Iris might not have her Good Deeds , but she certainly has a book she can work with.
Wave
2010 | In the past month: an earthquake in Haiti, an earthquake in Chile. Three debilitating northeastern snowstorms. A total of sixty inches of snow in Central Park, the snowiest winter on record. What can we look forward to next? Another earthquake or superstorm? The world has always been in some sort of frenzy, but in the past several decades we’ve fucked up the world. We’ve cut down the trees; we’ve burned too much oil; we’ve put ourselves in a position where we’re using more electricity than ever. How many tools are in our hands right now, iPad, iPod, iPhone?
The TV is soundless as I write this morning. I peek out the corner of my eye and go back to my laptop screen. I believe I am waiting for tsunami waves to crush the docks and benches of Hawaii, the little buildings around the harbor. Raw destruction: that’s what we want. A man running down a green stretch of lawn, a smaller man grabbing a tree trunk as water swings his legs up to the surface.
But a wave does not come without warning, as an earthquake does. Neruda: “I awakened when dreamland gave way beneath / my bed.” No, a wave is all height and density. We can’t hope for a weather front to block it. We can’t expect it to take a different course. A wave is absolute. A wave is the voice we can’t hear coming; a wave is the song of fire. We watch helplessly, but greedily, as the unaware still sleep in their beds, the animal cry of the siren filling up the dawn. And then a porch light trips on.
1987 | I’m not sure how I’ve ended up working as a technical writer, in an office park in King of Prussia, a full hour west of Cherry Hill, but it’s a relief not to stand in front of several classes of comp students, which is what Denise is doing these days. She’s decided that teaching is preferable to my full-time work week, even though I tell her about taking full advantage of my job’s flextime policy, about slipping down and out the back stairs without telling anyone. The truth is Denise is probably on fire in front of the classroom. I imagine her getting larger: a generous, challenging, tough, wise creature. I imagine her walking back and forth in front of her students, gesturing with her beautiful hands. She’s talking about Beowulf or Hamlet or The School for Scandal. Certainly she knows her students are in thrall to her. She can see the glint in the eye of one young man with thick dark hair; he always sits in the back, knees spread wide apart, the back of his head pressed against the wall. She makes sure to make eye contact with him; it is good to see that hint of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, before her eyes move on to the next person.
To have such charisma and control in front of the room! Whenever I teach, I am fighting the oncoming wave. I can’t even sit on the desk in front of them without feeling it on my back, the cold of it, purified from coming across a great distance at sixty miles an hour. If only those students in the chairs knew that I was never in AP English, that I hardly read books in high school, that I once got an F on a pop quiz on A Raisin in the Sun because I’d never even cracked the damn thing open, though we’d been talking about the play in class for two weeks.
Still, I like the people in my department. They’re smart, funny. They’re worldly. A motley mix, one is a former dancer, one is the former bass guitarist for a rock band. Even my boss is a former resident of the writers conference in Vermont. I’m sure this is why she hires me, as everyone’s title here implies the word “former.” But they make the former an
Wave
2010 | In the past month: an earthquake in Haiti, an earthquake in Chile. Three debilitating northeastern snowstorms. A total of sixty inches of snow in Central Park, the snowiest winter on record. What can we look forward to next? Another earthquake or superstorm? The world has always been in some sort of frenzy, but in the past several decades we’ve fucked up the world. We’ve cut down the trees; we’ve burned too much oil; we’ve put ourselves in a position where we’re using more electricity than ever. How many tools are in our hands right now, iPad, iPod, iPhone?
The TV is soundless as I write this morning. I peek out the corner of my eye and go back to my laptop screen. I believe I am waiting for tsunami waves to crush the docks and benches of Hawaii, the little buildings around the harbor. Raw destruction: that’s what we want. A man running down a green stretch of lawn, a smaller man grabbing a tree trunk as water swings his legs up to the surface.
But a wave does not come without warning, as an earthquake does. Neruda: “I awakened when dreamland gave way beneath / my bed.” No, a wave is all height and density. We can’t hope for a weather front to block it. We can’t expect it to take a different course. A wave is absolute. A wave is the voice we can’t hear coming; a wave is the song of fire. We watch helplessly, but greedily, as the unaware still sleep in their beds, the animal cry of the siren filling up the dawn. And then a porch light trips on.
1987 | I’m not sure how I’ve ended up working as a technical writer, in an office park in King of Prussia, a full hour west of Cherry Hill, but it’s a relief not to stand in front of several classes of comp students, which is what Denise is doing these days. She’s decided that teaching is preferable to my full-time work week, even though I tell her about taking full advantage of my job’s flextime policy, about slipping down and out the back stairs without telling anyone. The truth is Denise is probably on fire in front of the classroom. I imagine her getting larger: a generous, challenging, tough, wise creature. I imagine her walking back and forth in front of her students, gesturing with her beautiful hands. She’s talking about Beowulf or Hamlet or The School for Scandal. Certainly she knows her students are in thrall to her. She can see the glint in the eye of one young man with thick dark hair; he always sits in the back, knees spread wide apart, the back of his head pressed against the wall. She makes sure to make eye contact with him; it is good to see that hint of a smirk in the corner of his mouth, before her eyes move on to the next person.
To have such charisma and control in front of the room! Whenever I teach, I am fighting the oncoming wave. I can’t even sit on the desk in front of them without feeling it on my back, the cold of it, purified from coming across a great distance at sixty miles an hour. If only those students in the chairs knew that I was never in AP English, that I hardly read books in high school, that I once got an F on a pop quiz on A Raisin in the Sun because I’d never even cracked the damn thing open, though we’d been talking about the play in class for two weeks.
Still, I like the people in my department. They’re smart, funny. They’re worldly. A motley mix, one is a former dancer, one is the former bass guitarist for a rock band. Even my boss is a former resident of the writers conference in Vermont. I’m sure this is why she hires me, as everyone’s title here implies the word “former.” But they make the former an
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