A POST!

Eric,

A prose poem for y'all during break. I was thinking about making the middle part have line breaks and be more in Billy's voice. I wrote this for verse writing, as a "creative response" to Native American writings on poetry. There was a quote in one of the essays we read that this came from. It was:

"Beneath the map imposed by science is a map in the blood that takes us back to a more original knowing—that we are not a separate creation."

Billy Fulson: Cartographer

Today in preschool Billy Fulson scribbled a map of his world. Prior to this, he had no experience in cartography. The teacher gave the assignment. Magic markers and pieces of paper were passed out, which is all you need for cartography. The kids began, tried to present experience with geographical boundaries. Billy wanted to show this:

where the color-swirler, image-creator is when he watches the bigger people form lines and pass the ball and hurt each other with his dad—moments of familial good-fortune and twining; where his mother sits in the good green armchair and stares at pieces of paper all pushed together when dad isn't home and she actually has a smile (a smile!) and he can walk to her and she will pick him up and kiss him so much it hurts his face but he doesn't care because it's his mother; where his mother takes him on weekends in the park with Anaximander, their dog, that part with the box of sand and the other kids who laugh with him and want to play on the swing with him even though his mom won't let him because it's dangerous but they still want to play with him; where his mother leaves him everyday and promises she will be back to to get him again, and he always worries even though he knows somehow he shouldn't; where he goes behind the house, inside a cleaner corner of the old red-chipped stable that his mother told him she was in when her and her father visited the house and that at that time a snake fell on her hair—in there he has put a small table and a chair (that his parent's have been looking for), and when he sees his parent's eyes getting smaller and mouths moving faster there he sits in the silence of self-constructed spaces that are filled by moments you don't want to be a part of, that you live within even when and though you aren't in them, that are so much more of a home than where you keep your head at night.

Making her rounds, the teacher saw Billy's scribbles and didn't know what they meant because scribbles are subjective. Even though Billy's teacher tried so hard to intertwine with the singular subjectivity of children she could not, just as she couldn't combine with that of her husband who was an architect and planned public restrooms on interstate highways. She told him he should do something grander, better. He told her he liked what he did; it was important. She looked at Billy's scratches of experience and told him "Good job. Keep at." But none of it she understood.