just couldn’t grasp it...

from my anthology of must read (a)merican poems

Denise Duhamel

Ego


I just didn’t get it –
even with the teacher holding an orange (the earth) in one hand
and a lemon (the moon) in the other,
her favorite student (the sun) standing behind her with a
      flashlight.
I just couldn’t grasp it –
this whole citrus universe, these bumpy planets revolving so slowly
no one could even see themselves moving.
I used to think if I could only concentrate hard enough
I could be the one person to feel what no one else could,
sense a small tug from the ground, a sky shift, the earth changing
      gears.
Even though I was only one mini-speck on a speck,
even though I was merely a pinprick in one goosebump on the
      orange,
I was sure then I was the most specially perceptive, perceptively
      sensitive.
I was sure then my mother was the only mother to snap –
“The world doesn't revolve around you!”
The earth was fragile and mostly water
just the way the orange was mostly water if you peeled it,
just the way I was mostly water if you peeled me.
Looking back on that third-grade science demonstration,
I can understand why some people gave up on fame or religion or
      cures –
especially people who have an understanding
of the excruciating crawl of the world,
who have a well-developed sense of spatial reasoning
and the tininess that it is to be one of us.
But not me – even now I wouldn’t mind being god, the force
who spins the planets the way I spin a globe, a basketball, a
      yoyo.
I wouldn’t mind being that teacher who chooses the fruit,
or that favorite kid who gives the moon its glow.

*

Duhamel’s is such a necessary voice in our poetry. A biting humor – penetrating, real. This poem carries me back to the smell & sound of hardwood floors in elementary school. The coat closet. A swing set the size of a small village.

And, yes, wouldn’t I like to be the one to give the moon its glow. Wouldn’t we all –

Spend time with Duhamel’s poetry, and you will begin to hear a different way to say the extraordinary.