My father was a teacher so I was a teacher, perhaps the same way a shoemaker’s daughter learns to love leather. I was grading high school English papers under the dim light of the kitchen table by the time I was 10. My father gave me a red ink pen to circle grammatical errors on his students’ handwritten essays and I spotted them easily, winning frosted apple squares as compensation for my time.
I’ve been following a jagged path for a while now, though if I have to stick to a story, I’ll mention writing, teaching and traveling as a trio of themes that have kept me ticking since I was a little kid. I made magazines, bound books, performed poems, spoke soliloquies, tied my worth to words and the nesting-doll effect of their power. Watch what I can do, said the little magician within.
Later, I had to figure out how to make money. I learned to pay attention to the world around me even as it flew right past me. Some of my earliest gigs involved serving drinks at a country club to rich people with gold-toned buttons fastened all the way to their necks. I’d punch into work with a timesheet each shift hoping to see Flores, a short guy with rosy cheeks who washed dishes in the kitchen. His name meant “flower,” and I loved this detail. That whole summer was a crash course in crushes.
I heard rumors that Flores slept on the floor in a dorm with a group of other seasonal workers from Mexico that summer. I didn’t understand what any of this meant but I took notes on these unjust circumstances and wanted more information. There are all kinds of reasons why people don’t talk or if they do, they’ll tell you a tale so tall it obscures the more painful truths unfolding. Flores was fine for the time being, as long as I didn’t interfere.
First, I was a poet. Then I was a teacher. Next, a journalist.
Zanzibar gave me the courage to ask questions and attempt to translate answers across great distances. When a stuffed passenger ferry sank, I started taking notes. Hundreds of bodies washed ashore. When the “radical” imams got arrested and thrown into prison, I tried to get the story. Prison guards shaved their heads and beards to humiliate them. When the fishermen battled sea turf for octopus, I went to the field to observe. I still remember how they slapped the living creatures against rocks to kill and tenderize their bodies.
How little I knew then about what happens to a story when you try to hold it, how it slips through one’s fingers like water.
I slow-drifted into journalism and now I’m swimming my way back out of those waters. As a poet, questions contain the seeds of something green—the imagination is all about audacious metaphor, the power to pair two disparate things and find a connection between them. This creates a “felt infinity” inside the poem, at least, and sometimes extends to life itself.
As a journalist, questions often create more conflict than clarity. If I ask a question, the assumed story already looms so large between us, there’s little room for anything else but the obvious answer. I can usually tell when someone’s lying to me, though. In a poem, the lie is it its own truth. In a story, it’s a stone wedged between reader, writer, and source.
A question without a deadline sets us all free.
#Transit Slips, #8
