When you lay your head on the desk
you hear a riot in the wood—air sucked

down a hollow hall and crows calling.
In that long passage built by sound

there’s no sleep, only one door after another,
and noises threatening to burst in,

not into the world of the wooden desk with
its irregular heart-beat, but the world

of the room and its children. You hold
your head above the scarred plank

so that the clamor in the wood hardly
reaches you, so visions won’t be afraid

to find you, your neck twisted and
your fist bunched under your hair,

you can’t say what’s coming, something
beyond milk, something your left hand

curled into position and etching out
its first sounds can’t hear yet—biting

your cheek, the smell of the pencil
still on your fingers. And while you try

to ignore the scuffing feet under the desks,
you see that part of you is not a child at all,

part of you is something besides a person,
a floating blanket above your child’s

cramped body, still waiting even when
the teacher claps her hands to revive

the class so when you lift your head
the blanketing-self brushes your face,

you are waiting to become, you’ll wait as long
as you have to, shell to feather, ink to utterance,

body beyond the body, beyond
the body, pulling you, clumsy and tripping,

leading you through membranes of self,
filmy home you can’t see like inside

the leafy head of a huge tree
you keep climbing, branch after branch,

twigs somehow keeping you aloft,
and how you learn to step on them without

looking, as if you really know the way.