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Essay Model

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Essay Model            — Unit 1: "Allegory of the Cave," The Truman Show , various selected texts. The prompt is something like “what’s really real?” Beneath and behind the shadows and actors, chains  and sirens and a guy going to work  again the way he always does,  what’s that light round the rim , glimmering like broken glass?    The challenge is to synthesize,  to take a jostling mass   of texts and see that “yes,  they don’t all look the same,  but here’s this one, central claim.”   They always turn it in round 9/11, a day that means to them the weather’s beginning to turn and maybe they’ll wear their hoodie to the game.  I was only seven, my mom, as she'd come to say, "reading history to you as history was made," and today we aren’t anywhere near  New York and gone by 25 years,  but phone records model  how to answer the prompt  directly, cut throu...
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Birthday Poem

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Birthday Poem The real hammer and the real wrench to build with dad are still in the canvas bag, realisitcally a few years out. But the real tape  fits neatly in her hand, five years old  today, and the way it rolls out and snaps back is the real gift, with the princess watch that really works. Sixty Seventeen . Forty  Twelve. Eighteen Nine . From her room she calls the span of things, or maybe time,  both of which are very very real  but also small  and easily misplaced, like the real, heart-shaped  locket, which always, we tell her,  at the end of the day slips off  and goes back in the music box.  
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Carry the Bow

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Carry the Bow Against conventional wisdom the groom  entrusted him the real thing—Eumaeus,  a boy in a Tennessee church,  in his pocket both the rings.  He spent all afternoon thumbing  the promise, that smooth curve  final and firm as his name,  his own name , printed in  the program, but all the same  he thought it would never come.   Then suddenly it was time.  The doors swung wide. From both sides suitors leered, smiling sweetly  as they willed him to trip  and toss the band so their fingers  could go plunging in.  He shot straight ahead, remembered what he’d been told.  He couldn’t see the face but knew  it was him, backlit gold.
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Re-wiring

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Re-wiring A short somewhere, and sparks:  Dead ladybug wedged  in wicker, spray-painted green— Mower’s tight turn  round the elderberry  bush, leaves dewing clean   the tires—fat fly circling  the teacher’s baldspot  the way I’ve hovered round  God’s helipad, hoping  to touch down. This world,  these flashes: what are we fixing to let it make of us? 
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U6

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U6 Late August. Everyone’s shirts were soaked. By rights  the parents had worked  enough to earn more than a lawn chair. A storm  building, 14 miles east  per Layla’s dad. Elijah’s wasn’t  there. Most of them  still stopped the ball  with their hands when it got rolling too fast. Sometimes,  mid-practice, I forget  just what it is we’re drilling for.  We gathered beneath the gray,  stacked sticky hands and waited for Elijah, who put the burned skin of his re-membered one right on top. We thundered.
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French Drain Quote

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French Drain Quote How the house is built  you can't hill soil up  the siding, level out  the grade. A little self- forgiveness: You weren't there when the land was made. Downspouts help but won’t address how Georgia clay holds rain like a thick, wet resentment, swelling to buckle  the basement’s knees. No one’s saying it’s free,  but life at such a degree  means shaping oneself  a vein through the heart of the yard, pumping its share of the downpour towards  more fruitful pursuits  on the other side: Bee Balm  and Buttonbush, the comeback miracle of mushroom.
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Where He's From

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Where He’s From   Even then it mattered much  to him, how he was born  in South Carolina, raised in North. No one asked, or cared, but he  split hairs on his right  to the Palmetto sticker stuck  on his high school truck, felt his edges peel up round  Tar Heel games and low-country broils both. How could he have known  it was the tension to which his life  would persistently adhere? Hell, with even heaven and earth, wherever his tires touch  and just past the reach  of his high beams, his soul  is humming in the inter-state,  both there and here.
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