-origins in poetry for the less-than advanced reader-

1.

I'd learned early on

during my formal elementary education

that the planets (of which, glossy representations
were clothes-pinned above the blackboard
strung on a wire from the Sun, outward) were worthy
of a rare classroom attentiveness.

the planets held my interest by the gravity

of their mysterious individual behavior; that beyond the planets,

the universe was big, even back then; that my standing between

the Narrows of the Watuppa, and the ocean-seeking Taunton,

wasn't the center of everything;

that if I traveled beyond the southend of town by car or bike,

passing the "Dairy Queen" and "Ponta Delgada Drive-In,"

I wouldn’t fall from the Earth's edge into the abyss, with
who knows what

                          waiting

                                    down 

                                            there.

at about the same time as this early understanding of

the solar system's globular cluster, and the vastness beyond,
I began to notice that Norena Ferreira’s legs

were more fascinating than I had previously realized,
an observation belonging less to any discussion

of my formal elementary education, than to a discussion

of my informal elementary education.

2.

these recollections came to me after a reading of Schubert’s 8th in 2009.