Teaching in Prison


I wanted to tell you about the front gate at Fishkill
(yes, it's iron bars), and how the desk guard
in her boxy, iron blue uniform,
badge on blue, keys and communications devices
dangling from her squared off waist,
tests her metal detector.
This is how:  as you stand before her,
arms outstretched like a totem,
shoes three feet apart, she flicks
the hand held unit on, and runs it
over her left breast, and then it squeals.
Her nipple or her heart?  But she's not playing,
her eyes deflect as much intimacy
as the name plate on her shirt front. 
Today, she touched it off
with a nonchalant sweep
downward over her belt buckle
before she probed me with its wire loop.
I had plucked myself clean, as always,
of coins, keys, watch, and didn't squeal.
 
I wanted to tell you about the girls in frocks
that skip along their ribcages, and
the way the breeze
plaits gay cottons and polys around their thighs;
how they smile, and brush back their hair,
how they're fresh pressed, fresh minted 
their smiles are high school smiles, nothing between them and prettiness,
their dresses for a picnic, not the time clock
they punch just outside the iron door.
And maybe they've been on lunchtime picnics
with their families, before punching in
for the second shift at Fishkill,
or maybe they have evening plans with boyfriends 
a beer, a walk down by the river 
boys whose hearts will thwack at the panty lines
visible in the sunset through those thin frocks,
or dance to the crueler beat of foreknowledge.
Those dresses are not for work,
certainly not at Fishkill.
The girls wave their fingers to the desk guard,
and disappear down the hall to change.
 
I know there is a room down there, with lockers
--no different from a girl's gym
and yet I see it with the heart's incandescence
for being in the heart of Fishkill Prison;
those pretty girls
with blonde hair swept black, dark ringlets, sandy clouds,
eyelashes blooming to the dimensions of pride,
taking their pretty frocks off,
their open toed sandals,
putting on blue twill pants
without waists or hips or bottoms
closing shirts as heavy as iron doors over their breasts,
sealing the closure with their names, and the name of
the New York State Department of Corrections,
walking out to their stations in heavy black shoes.
 
These are the wrong stories,
but you must understand I have no enemies here.
The guards smile at me, and I smile back,
gates pop open as I show the card with my picture
head on, unsmiling, in a white fisherman's sweater
(it was taken in the room where they process new arrivals;
next to the camera is a box of letters and numbers).
 
Should I tell you, then, about the way the sky looked
my first time in the yard,
the depth of its clarity?
It was 5:30, and winter.
The sunset had withdrawn,
no purple left, no rose, no crimson,
a deep blue glowing through a darker blue
as if blue had finally been revealed
as the ultimate secret of the cosmos.
The sky is always beautiful over Fishkill Prison,
beautiful over Downstate Prison.
Always.
And so big!  The low buildings,
the rolling yard, the razor wire fences
make a space that demands such a panorama to cover it all.
The beach doesn't take so much sky,
the prairies of Wyoming,
the Badlands of the Dakotas.
Maybe only the ocean.
All that sky,
to cover a prison!

​You tell me at Greenhaven,
built like a dungeon,
the walls are so high
that the sky is only a pocket.
But what do we have to do with space?
classrooms are all the same size,
cells are all alike.
What does the sky matter between us?
Listen:  if I were sure that what I don't know
was more important than what I do know,
I suppose I'd try to learn the one and forget the other.