My students that one April were sudden, quixotic, real.
Teaching Oedipus the King came easy,
All the late arrivals started coming on time,
And I felt like a superstar teacher,
One with an electric tote bag, armed for irony,
Greek choruses, masks that show a character’s emotion.
[Oedipus worries the fates of his daughters
Down to the bone of his eye sockets.
Who would have them?
Who would surrender to their dirty seed beds?
To their dancing ancestry at a crossroads with flying
Goads, white whiskers, the cutting sand and ceremony?]
At the art museum with the black teens,
John tried to talk to a white Goth girl while Isaiah played.
Dorian said to Isaiah, “That’s just the kind of dude you are.”
I took note of the sketch of Addie covering her breasts, of titles and images:
Hot-blooded girl
In dry dock
Road pale
Patio with cloud
Mule skull
Gray and brown leaves
The cliff chimneys
The black door with snow
Hotel Cro Magnon
Bullet holes in the mattress
And in the side room of Georgia O’Keefe I saw children sketching poppies.
[Oedipus asks for his daughters not to be taken from him.
This pleading of what will be of what may happen to them.
He had daughters, but no children as Oppen says.
What exactly is that supposed to mean?
Arching womb brought wreckage.
They will have no one, he worried,
He crowed about their lineage.
Eyeless hawking for some remedy.]
When we read Oedipus the King in class,
The teens took to it well, my teaching of irony:
Dramatic irony, irony of situation, verbal irony,
And of fate vs. free will. Dorian read Oedipus well with
Just enough arrogance and vulnerability as he had both
Arrogance and vulnerability to fates he did not yet see,
Until they were there upon him: street fights and underemployment.
But for a time he was grand, and so was the class as they put other
Characters to the test:
Odysseus: free will with a bit of fate
Prometheus: fate and he didn’t care
Gilgamesh: free will, but Enkidu: fate
Harry Potter: free will on a fateful, scary journey
Mercedes, the girl who wanted to be a boy,
Slept through the Oedipus reading, said this crap
Was boring. I said she was the boring one.
Not exactly what they put in a teacher’s manual,
But I had the force of the class behind me, even
The roughest ones nodded their heads, so the next day
She came with her literature text opened and asked
To be the messenger.
[Tink, tink goes his cane over the tile floor.
The daughters are something to worry over
And so are the sons when sons are hung
Over sand and dust with a spike hit through the feet,
For Oedipus means “swollen foot.” He cries from the mountain
Until another man finds him, and the story starts again.]
“Why wouldn’t dude just forget the Oracle?”
A valid question, I thought, as I looked over the lake, resplendent
In the afternoon light, a landscape in itself out the art museum’s wall of windows.
I watched some white people watch my students
As they looked at an installation of mattresses
Shot with bullet holes and outlined bodies made with crime scene tape
On the floors. “Why would I come here to see this when I could go to
23rd and Wright?” Dorian asked.
I see them all now, as time has passed and they have gone.
They are on a stage, bowing to each other in referential theatrics.
They have put their masks on, playing to the world.