For semester’s end, an exam
By Brother Rob Peach, F.S.C.
1.
My little brothers
Many of whom are bigger
And brighter
Than I will ever
Be
I know in anxious turns of
Stomach
You wait for what is
To constitute
The impending doom
Wrought
By clever, semester end
Questioning…
(But have no fear)
To me
You will salute
In letter form
That with blue booked-beginnings
Starts as follows…
2.
“Dear Brother Peach
You ask what I have learned
Well
This is what I tell you
With open notes
On index card
before me…
A number of things
Of which I speak
With ease
Lest I failed to listen with
Perspicacity
As you spoke sometimes
In thoughtlessness
Yet
With the ‘humble’ intent
To expand our
Consciousness, collective—
Even if you made
No sense
I give you what I have to offer
My own experience”
3.
So proffer me
My brothers
With your best
Insight
Tell me what you understand
Or what in flight
Comes to you
From the pages of the
Text—that body
Of breathing words
The musings of
A distant mind
That western hemisphere
A faraway land
Of imagination
Write as you would
A brother
Who from you
Is somehow
Far removed
From your lived
Experience
Am I
After all
Not that?
Which is to say
Not you?
I cannot decide your
Meaning
For you
Let the text do that
Instead
As you two meet in
Dialogue
4.
Speak to me of
Experience
That has taught you what
You know
When though an
Open door
You walked
With the energy of a
September sunrise
Perhaps you were afraid
Then
And maybe
You still
Are
On these shuddering morns of
Winter
When with that cold
Us it does embrace
5.
So
In the ticking of that turning
Feeling’s hour
Fill a page to its edges
As though approaching
A blue-lined precipice
(With a pen as your walking staff)
Your thoughts
They will surly spill
As your pens stride
Just to drop
To their honorable
Deaths
6.
Tell me
Please
With the same force that wills
You move
Why it is
That we have reason to walk
(which is to say, “to write”)
At all
Is it a pecuniary measure?
A force of word
For which we are paid
In penny
As Poe was
(If you will recall)
Put that vocab
You have learned
By rote
To use in dialogue
With an audience that
Seeks to see
Your voice
Young and impetuous
Though
It is
But even still
Maturing
And not
To be
Forgotten
7.
Can you do that for
You?
With references
Indubitably
To authors and their lives
Remember
That they
Like you
Have hearts that beat
In blue
They too breathed
This air
(We share)
That turns our
Struggle
To a flaming hue
“Spill over, spill over”
This page does command us
“Upon the blankest page”
And take the time
To give
What only
Grows with age
That defining
Character
Of the oldest sage
8.
Patience
My brothers
And the calm of
Wisdom
You realize more than
You have
Forgotten
Sift through the ancient
Daze
When there was a clearing in the forest
For log cabins
And their sylvan hermits
Who did live
Deliberately sucking
The bones of this life
Dry
Why
Did a man
Or a woman
Who chose to live
Alone
Feel the need
To speak in
Verse?
Or why write
About so common an occurrence
As crossing the Brooklyn Ferry
Lying in the grass
Or listening to the mass at work
In cities of such loud
Clanging?
Why a play about made up witches
In an era when
Is on the hunt?
9.
If philosophy is but a
Circle
(That never finds an end)
Why make moot
Points
In ink
About those Things
In Nature We
Can and cannot
See?
10.
On the front of battle
Fire burns in blood
At the site of which
Most of us
Would faint?
Why speak of such
Hellish things
That men create
Yet
Just as soon
Avoid?
Are you that youth
Who in impish
Desire melts
When life flashes
Its crimson flood upon
You?
Or are you that feathered thing?
(Though of this kind
There are two)
Are you the
One
That does not in despairing
Fall
But
Sings
With an amber voice of
Hope?
And wings that beat
In the solid whiteness of flight
Louder than
The dark din of war
Rumbling in the fog below
On the insane battleground of waltzing
Eternity?
11.
Why should you personify
That tree
Which never moves?
Or invert yourself
To the form of a silent, dumb
Dog
That flees across—
In the liberated light of night—
The escaping
Meadow of the moon?
Why express—
In the misty words of
A fictional lunatic’s mute appraisal—
The asylum site
Of a neighborhood cut
Into cell blocks
Like cookies baked
In society and laced with the freshest
Hallucinogens
12.
A man presses his
Fist against
A wrathful paper of prose
When it could
Raised in air
Pack a harder punch
Think now of
Rage
He did thus raise his
Five fingers clenched
While standing and staged
Before an empire of evil
And did with untamed
Screaming in lyrics loud from there
Against land scathed by hypocrisy
But restored in texture
With the flat surface of a page
Would you do the same?
13.
We speak of fear and paranoia
As thought a bloody heart buried
Beneath floor boards
We speak of love
Lost
In the intrusive squawk of a devilish crow
Named, “Nevermore”
We speak of love
As grand as she
Who launched ships innumerable—
Even across the waters
Of gothic man
Who has not forgotten Helen or
Annabel Lee
14.
What of that good man
Whose story seems better said
Around campfires buried deep in
Faithless woods
At once deforested and reforested
In the timeless, written will
Of human memory
A history
Survived in guilty violence by
Us
Who came of sin—
That great unTruth—
Disguised
As serpent fruit
15.
How might in writing we
Learn from our transgressions made
In the canon of the past?
Brothers
This I (at long) last ask you…
How does our earthen-vesseled time
Encapsulated in those sacred myths of man
Facts stored in fiction’s psalms
Dancing in literary movements
Renew itself
By the omnipotence
Of Nature’s thought ubiquitous
