Old Roads, New Stories: A Literary Series
1.
As a kid, I never wanted socks for a present. This was a long time ago, of course, before socks had properly evolved. Now there’s Bombas™, and long ones with llamas on them, and skater kids (it seems to me) who actually like all the plain white tube socks, and somehow the 21st century must be spun from softer wool, as if the sheep today—whether in Ireland or munching on the grass in Montana—just poof up into these clouds of stuff that’s a lot less scratchy. Anyway, socks. I wasn’t putting them on Christmas lists.
I didn’t ask for Pablo Neruda books either, but I should have, at least for this one: Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems, just to have “Ode to My Socks.”
I’m wearing socks right now. Chances are, so are you. So what’s this got to do with winter and the giving season?
Everything. You want warm feet in the winter, and socks are the best way to get them, unless you have a cat.
2.
Cats are the second gift.
3.
And teachers are the third.
Too many in this country have seemed ungrateful to them for too long, and too loudly. This poem isn’t going to change that, I know, or make the yammerers less hostile or less lousy to have to listen to. But it’s nearly the end of the semester now, with its oncoming crunch of grading still to get through, so in case you’re a teacher and no one’s thanked you lately, then let me be the first, and here’s something you can unwrap early:
The Teachers’ Story
To take facts and anchor them to interest.
To bowl strikes down the guttered lanes of boredom.
To walk fractions out to the playground and frisbee them around—
a struggle at first, then a wobble,
then the wobble turns into flight path,
then the flight path sails from I don’t get it into sudden Yes!
and 100 on the test next Monday…
To turn words into discovery.
To be fluent in the language of caring.
To be octa-lingually creative, year after year,
whether for richer or poorer,
whether in sickness or in health…
Because of this, I can write a story.
And it’s for you.
Rob Carney is the author of nine books of poems, including The Book of Drought (Texas Review Press, 2024), winner of the X.J. Kennedy Poetry Prize, and Call and Response (Black Lawrence Press, 2021), and his collection of creative nonfiction, Accidental Gardens: New & Revised, is forthcoming from Wakefield Press. His work has appeared in Cave Wall, The Dark Mountain Project, Sugar House Review, and many other journals, as well as the Norton anthology Flash Fiction Forward (2006). In 2013 he won the Terrain.org Poetry Award and in 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Prize for Poetry. He is a Professor of English at Utah Valley University and lives in Salt Lake City. Follow his Terrain.org series Old Roads, New Stories.
Read an interview with Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: “The Ocean is Full of Questions.”
Read Rob Carney’s Letter to America in Dear America: Letters of Hope, Habitat, Defiance, and Democracy, published by Terrain.org and Trinity University Press.
Read poetry by Rob Carney appearing in Terrain.org: 6th Annual Contest Finalist, 4th Annual Contest Winner, and Issue 30. And listen to an interview on Montana Public Radio about The Book of Sharks.
Header photo by s-wloczyk2, courtesy Pixabay.
