Copyright © Jen Currin, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Distribution of this electronic edition via the internet or any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal. Please do not participate in electronic piracy of copyright material; purchase only authorized electronic editions. We appreciate your support of the author's rights.
Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council. Coach House Books also acknowledges the support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Currin, Jen, 1972-, author
School / Jen Currin.
Poems.
eISBN 978-1-77056-377-3
I. Title.
PS 8605.U77S34 2014 C811′.6 C2013-907682-4
For all students and seekers
‘I confess that there is nothing to teach.’ – Lao Tzu
The Conditions
Other people are not just relationships.
It’s morning and the sun is setting.
Maybe you made the librarian look bad.
Clean the dust from your shrine.
‘Cheerfully accept these conditions, determined by your past lives.’
My plants suffer in the winter.
Maybe they keep the café door open so the customers will get cold and buy more coffee or leave.
We have all tried to keep someone/something alive.
Someone is leaving; someone is left.
Not the end of the world, just the end of a world.
I spent ten minutes crouched in a bookroom with my students, listening to the computerized ‘armed assailant’ warning play over and over.
After that, I was less afraid.
We are both changing and we can’t change that.
What you are washing is just a body.
What I am mourning is just this.
Before we were born, you asked me.
You asked me and I said yes.
Shrine for Every Part of You
In discord
We can’t be any other way
To break out of this house
you have to first break in
The holy ash scattered on the floor
Imagine a good argument
Now imagine the deepest blue of peace
In absence, waiting all day for night
In a cabinet with six farewell letters
In an oceanic bathtub
To wail over coins
To heal with water and sleep
Sympathetically
in our separate rooms
with forested bodies
and an eagerness for silence
Increasingly
The owls in my night class want to believe.
If your parents were missionaries – okay.
If you are a missionary – what the fuck
are you talking about?
We all want someone to release us.
It’s too painful
in this cage.
stealing into a festooned graveyard
to steal you a ribbon –
Fathers die, friend. I don’t know
what else to tell you.
And the talking cure isn’t really.
I shrink away in my shoddy acts of gender.
To enter another disappointment
stale with the first kiss.
A Pair of Shoes
Afternoons we can mime the ditches
and die almost human.
Die hungry, having tasted night.
You’re gorgeous and blunt,
telling me to wash my face.
It comes in through every window
like the words buzzing when we’re alone.
Nothing is unquestionable.
Sharp pencils and careful study
when we sense something’s breaking.
We could all be suddenly honest.
We could all surprise.
That careful other silence.
The death of a mother before we could ever hope
to understand her.
I
