The Shape of Longing

On Monday, Mrs. Blyth-Barrow and Mr. Mee team-taught a poetry unit in the library. A lot of kids groaned like this: “Not poe-eh-treeeeeeee!” as if what they meant was “Not death by poe-eh-treeeee!”

It was Bubba Davis’s turn to read aloud. “IthinkthatIshallneversee, apoemaslovelyasatree.”

Mrs. B-B frowned. “Slowly, Bubba, please. Enjoy the words. Enjoy!” She made a wheel-motion with her hand that meant “Once more, from the top.”

Bubba sighed. “I… think… that… I… shall… never… see… a… poem… as… lovely… as… a… tree.”

I woke up when my chin hit my chest.

Mr. Mee cleared his throat. “Thank you, Bubba, for that recitation of Mr. Frost’s poem. I think we can all agree, poetry excites the imagination!”

It was quiet. I guess nobody agreed.

“Now it’s time to write our own poems,” said Mr. Mee. He was standing beside an easel with a big pad on it. He picked up a Sharpie and uncapped it with a flourish. “Observe!” he said.

He turned to the easel and wrote:

Mountains toppling evermore

Into seas without a shore;

Seas that restlessly aspire,

Surging, unto skies of fire;

Lakes that endlessly outspread

Their lone waters—lone and dead—

Their still waters—still and chilly

With the snows of the lolling lily.

The poem was going pretty well before the lolling lily part, in my opinion. But the neat thing was how Mr. Mee wrote out the poem on the pad. He stacked the words so they made the shape of a mountain. For the part about the lone waters, he made the words spread out from the base of the mountain on either side, so that the words made up the surface of the sea. When he was done writing the mountain in the sea, we all clapped.

“Thank you, thank you, and thanks ad infinitum, wouldn’t you agree, to Edgar Allan Poe.”

Crickets.

“Of course I’ve taken liberties with Mr. Poe’s poem,” Mr. Mee said, “excerpting certain lines, writing the words into a shape…” His voice drifted away, one might say, like ripples in lone waters.

Mr. Mee tapped the Sharpie on the easel. “To take the exercise further, I could write a new poem, my own poem, about something large and abstract. An idea or a condition. Let’s say the idea or the condition is ‘longing.’ I could write my poem, as I did this one,” he said, tapping the easel again, “in the shape of a mountain. Let’s say my poem doesn’t have the word ‘mountain’ in it at all, and yet the shape of the poem illustrates, amplifies, the very subject of the poem. One’s longing might be said to be as large, as solid, as profound, as a mountain.” Mr. Mee looked at us.

We looked up, down, left, and right.

“Do you understand?” said Mr. Mee.

Someone had to throw our librarian a life preserver, and it was me. “Yes,” I said. Oh, I understood, all right. My longing was in the shape of a mountain too. A mountain of money.

You know how sometimes your brain jumps from one thought to another thought, and you’re not sure how it got there? I mention this because right then my brain went from the word profound to: Heck, I have a dad that is probably not dead, and if he’s not exactly waiting to be found, still, he must be out there for the finding, right? There was a character on The Sands of Time who didn’t know he had a kid, and when he found out, he cried and cried—he was so happy to give away his vast fortune.

Anyone who’s ever read a single chapter from Ripley’s knows for a fact that truth is even stranger than fiction. If I had a dad out there… wouldn’t he have to give me money?