When Mrs. Albright visited
our classroom in her busy smock,
I cowered while the others cheered.
How could one line possibly
lead into another?
And why smear charcoal
where we might form letters
of the alphabet, the beautiful letters
pulling in a heavenly train
on parallel tracks above the board?
For this I knew, as well
as I knew that Jesus loved me:
Thou shalt make no graven image.
But write thee all the words
I have spoken upon the scroll.
So I sat there, quiet, staring
at my empty paper, water colors
ready at hand. And all around me,
classmates freshening their dreams,
calling like sparrows across the room.
Mrs. Albright, why are you
still grabbing the paintbrush
out of my fingers, making it dart
like a thin blue lizard
across the desert of my page?
–
Paul Willis is a professor of English at Westmont College and a former poet laureate of Santa Barbara, California. His most recent collection is Deer at Twilight: Poems from the North Cascades (Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2018). Individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Los Angeles Review, Writer’s Almanac, and Best American Poetry.