I don’t recall how dark or gold his eyes were. I remember
a darkness that might
not have been iris, something that put me in mind of my dog,
his grateful look
and underneath, a well of grief. Maybe not his eyes, more
the way he bore pain
with dumbfounded dignity, his trouser leg going black with blood,
and Sanchez quiet
and far away as it ran freely down his leg, the fastest
blood in class.
What he really knew how to do was run with those long
rangy legs as silence
seemed to buoy him some way around the track, lap after
lap, never changing pace.
Sanchez could go on as others fell away as though he kept the world
within, spinning, gravity-flung
on the inside turn, while I, his teacher, labored at the last, the dead
end of my fourth grade
class, heaving and panting as they all galloped past with the
authority of the swift.
In class he’d lay his head sideways on the desk to write his journal
in a wavering line, words leaning
every which way like a row of shacks in a labor camp,
without punctuation
because the story never ended. He came from people who could run,
his mother ran away
to Oakland with his rawboned little sister when his uncle applied
the last of the pressure
that turned the hinge on the family door—his mother ran through it
for a midnight bus out of town.
Sanchez was left behind, he understood why his mother had to
take his sister and go—
she had no choice—and he knew there was nothing
his father could do—
locked up at Rose Valley. I wanted to tell Sanchez only the best
ones go to prison there—
addicts prone to beauty set down in a backcountry clutch
of Quonset huts crouched
beneath their discourse with the wind. Rose Valley didn’t
bother with prison walls,
a six-foot cyclone fence was all there was, each link crying
go if you want to,
but nobody did. That boy never wept at any injury except the time
I kept him after school.
I don’t remember the offence. Sanchez bowed his head slightly,
tears squeezed out sideways
against his will. His eyes were a kind of glassy topaz. Sanchez,
everyone makes mistakes,
and I’ve obviously made one here. So why don’t you just go.
He left without a word.
The boys who told me were former students back for a visit
before graduation.
They said: Sanchez? He’s been dead more than two years.
Drive-by.
I didn’t want to break down. I wanted to take it coolly,
the way they’d dished it out.
I turned away and checked the clock. He always said
he lapped me five times
and I answered four just to keep the argument alive,
to see him smile and insist.
Part of me believes he’s living still, loping somewhere,
with that big slow-mo
stride, as if there were two worlds, as if the only thing left
to do in this one is run.