New Each Year

New Each Year

The first day of school each year and my attention was up front,
not on my teacher but on the blackboard. Was it

possible to get it that clean with a bucket and sponge,
or did they coat it with some special chalk-
defying paint? The moment would come when she –

almost always a she – would take up the cigarette
in her fingers and touch it to the coal surface

and stroke it in rhythmic loops and sweeps across,
and after that it was never pure again.
The ghosts of all the parsings or diagrams

would float beneath those things she gave each day,
and the slate was never pure again. And sometimes

while my reverie took me far away,
I would stare at one of the corners of the
board, untouched through all the year, the black

so deep and clean, and think of all the accumulated
whispers, the layers of forgotten hours.

~ S.K. Orr