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Saturday Creative Writing
Class for Fifth Grade Kids
by Earl Coleman
Samantha reads to us. She
glows like fuel rods, with summer spent. I'm badly
smitten. Not with lines she's written, but with
her pert beret on bobbed black hair. She's grown.
I follow her tale blindly in my dotage as she
leads me on with honey voice, vacation-darkened
skin, exposed perhaps on sand where she had innocently
dreamed and unembarrassedly permitted sun to kiss
her as the tide came in.
Is she aware I'm swept
up and away like so much jetsam, waterlogged and
foundering, her amber words as always lambent,
plangent as the foam? I'm tossed about not by
the story's denouement, development of character
and plot, but by her style, the woman-ness that
blossoms right before my eyes as though she is
an early iris pushing past the frost through unresistant
loam.
Stephen offers up appraisal
of her work as I have taught him, forthright,
kind, no longer hers but ours now she's released
it, let it float to us, a bobbing bottle in its
anonymity, with wrinkled map and call for help
inside.
And I am in the groves
of academe with Plato where the sunlight blinds
arthritic olive trees and lush green hills, and
marvel how he held his youthful students tight
as he grew old. Was he besotted in his way as
I, my finger trembling toward some Tadzio in surf
hip-high, staring back at me to lead me on, even
as I guide him safely past the bar?
I call on Sarah May.
(Published by
Northeast, 1/16/02.)
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