School. Jen Currin

      

      Copyright © Jen Currin, 2014

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      Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.

      LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

      Currin, Jen, 1972-, author

      School / Jen Currin.

      Poems.

      eISBN 978-1-77056-377-3

      I. Title.

      PS 8605.U77S34 2014 C811′.6 C2013-907682-4

      For all students and seekers

      ‘I confess that there is nothing to teach.’ – Lao Tzu

      The Conditions

      Other people are not just relationships.

      It’s morning and the sun is setting.

      Maybe you made the librarian look bad.

      Clean the dust from your shrine.

      ‘Cheerfully accept these conditions, determined by your past lives.’

      My plants suffer in the winter.

      Maybe they keep the café door open so the customers will get cold and buy more coffee or leave.

      We have all tried to keep someone/something alive.

      Someone is leaving; someone is left.

      Not the end of the world, just the end of a world.

      I spent ten minutes crouched in a bookroom with my students, listening to the computerized ‘armed assailant’ warning play over and over.

      After that, I was less afraid.

      We are both changing and we can’t change that.

      What you are washing is just a body.

      What I am mourning is just this.

      Before we were born, you asked me.

      You asked me and I said yes.

      Shrine for Every Part of You

      In discord

      We can’t be any other way

      To break out of this house

      you have to first break in

      The holy ash scattered on the floor

      Imagine a good argument

      Now imagine the deepest blue of peace

      In absence, waiting all day for night

      In a cabinet with six farewell letters

      In an oceanic bathtub

      To wail over coins

      To heal with water and sleep

      Sympathetically

      in our separate rooms

      with forested bodies

      and an eagerness for silence

      Increasingly

      The owls in my night class want to believe.

      If your parents were missionaries – okay.

      If you are a missionary – what the fuck

      are you talking about?

      We all want someone to release us.

      It’s too painful

      in this cage.

      stealing into a festooned graveyard

      to steal you a ribbon –

      Fathers die, friend. I don’t know

      what else to tell you.

      And the talking cure isn’t really.

      I shrink away in my shoddy acts of gender.

      To enter another disappointment

      stale with the first kiss.

      A Pair of Shoes

      Afternoons we can mime the ditches

      and die almost human.

      Die hungry, having tasted night.

      You’re gorgeous and blunt,

      telling me to wash my face.

      It comes in through every window

      like the words buzzing when we’re alone.

      Nothing is unquestionable.

      Sharp pencils and careful study

      when we sense something’s breaking.

      We could all be suddenly honest.

      We could all surprise.

      That careful other silence.

      The death of a mother before we could ever hope

      to understand her.

      I hear you singing underneath your blanket

      and it’s so cold out this morning.

      Six Scents or Return of the Thieving Child

      Yes, that is blood you taste.

      The ever-growing space between us.

      It’s good to be judged, to know

      how it feels.

      I can give god to you, and you can give

      god back to me.

      We take so much medicine

      but in the end it’s the same amount of glass.

      The illness eats away our lives in just a day or two.

      I lost you after class, in the weeds and crushed water bottles.

      Trying to be possibly human,

      to feel pretty good about the disadvantages.

      You asked the question, so I’m going to trust

      that you want answers.

      It’s true: I accidentally ate chocolate, planned a wedding

      and described an old man’s perfume.

      So many cloves in the chai it made my lips burn.

      It’s true: Woke in the pre-dawn, before bells,

      excited to meditate.

      True: she would