Poet of the Month 107: LAURA KASISCHKE

 

 

LAURA KASISCHKE

c 2017 

 

 

 

 

 

WHAT I LEARNED IN NINTH GRADE

 

 

 

Always, it's early winter, and you can

  always

see through the venetian blinds

that you are floating, and lost

in a classroom made of mist.  And

  that

 

the false flattery of certain groups of

  girls

is a feast of pure sugar that you must

  eat

with your eyes closed while you

swallow down its spoonfuls

along with your flatterers' smiles.

 

And you'll do it. Tropism =

 

a natural inclination. The roots

grow down. The bird flies up. In some

future my husband will run toward

  the accident

to see whether we can help, while I'll

  stand

frozen on the sidewalk

covering my eyes with my hands.

 

But that was just Biology.

And Mrs Anders liked me. Elsewhere

 

there's a number

that is not the phone number of a 

  friend, but

which I'm told I have to memorize,

  for

 

without this number, the whole

civilization will have to end, and I 

  might

never go on to tenth grade,

  remaining

forever in ninth.

 

God, how hard Mr Nestor was trying

in his raging kindness and shiny ties

 

to teach us what it meant

to designate the ratio of the

  circumference of

a circle to its diameter, and to call it

  pi.

 

But this was Dummy Math. Some of

  us

were sleeping. Some of us were high.

Some of us were so desperate and

  confused

that we were weeping. Surely

 

he wasn't serious. We

would never flunk or die. Surely

one day a cure could be found for the

  kind

of cancer my mother had, and 

then there would no longer be

this need for math. Surely

some researcher at some place

like Harvard — a place

I've been assured

I'll never see — will

discover this eventually. And even

 

if a cure for math cannot be found,

  can

math not simply be destroyed? This

 

is the greatest country in the world.

  Why

must its children suffer under pi? 

  Cannot

 

a scapegoat be slaughtered on an

  altar

as in the Bible? Or an entire

civilization, as in the past? May we

 

not bomb it, invade it, steal its oil —

or set its oil wells on fire at least? To

 

my fellow soldiers (dummies, all of

  us

— ruthless, and proud of it) I

 

said, 'We will spare their children

if we can, of course, but

only if they renounce their god of

  pi...' 

 

Yes, in another year I would learn of

  love

from reading about Daisy and Jay.

  But

in ninth grade I learned about hatred:

  How

 

to raise an army in my imagination.

How to dress it in bright uniforms

with hierarchical stripes. How

to spray the peaceful valleys of my

enemies with pesticides

until it rained poisonous butterflies

  onto

their flesh from the skies. And then,

  sweet

 

Jesus, after it had already been

memorized, to be told

that 3.14159

is not quite pi.

Because pi is irrational,

and transcendent, so

pi might just go on and on.

 

Or not go on.

 

Like ninth grade, or civilization,

  which

also began

and ended in Babylon. 

 

 

 

New and Selected Poems

2017

 

 

 

 

 

 

Use the link below to read more poems by North American poet and novelist LAURA KASISCHKE:

 

 

 

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/laura-kasischke#tab-poems

 

 

 

 

 

 

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