Three poems by Willie Edward Taylor Carver Jr

I thought Mr. Weilder was gay.
He wasn’t, but you can understand my confusion since he got  emotional
when we read a poem by Sylvia Plath about her controlling father,
always waited moments before responding to our questions
with woolen words soft and sweet around the edges,
and once apologized for using pink and blue highlighters for boys and girls,
suggesting the colors were cliché and sexist.
He was a dry and foreign sprite in the threadbare and muddy hills of Appalachia.

Of course I loved him
and with all my might wanted him to see me,
to weep over my words,
to worry about the politics of my color choices,
to hear my question and look me in the eyes and wait years before answering.

In ninth grade, I joined his speech and drama team.

We met in the double-wide trailer behind the school.
An overworked aunt of a building, it served dozens of functions
when the regular school building was too busy,
and despite being neatly put away against the hillside,
it was always warm and unmoved by the depressed November fog,
standing quiet by the hill like it was having a work-break cigarette in the cold.

We all read the same poem out loud the first day, and after I read,
Mr. Weilder told me I had a strong emotional range
(even though every cell, organ, and system in my body
was feeling only the light bursting out in churchsong
as the bonds of all of my atoms burst apart
by the pull of the single emotion of pride).

We settled on an excerpt from a psychological thriller by Robert Bloch
that I was to memorize and recite in its entirety.

I recited it.
I licked every word in the story, to know its taste,
so that I could let people know which words were bitter, which made honey,
and which held fire quietly burning between consonants.
I wedged the sentences into my uncles’ mouths
to see what secrets the punctuation held;
I insisted the dialogue drive off my grandmother’s tongue
and took notes on its speed and gear;
I poured the vapored phrases into Mr. Weilder’s lungs
and took pictures of each verb as it escaped his airways
to see which ones reflected light.

For months, every Saturday morning,
I performed for my sleepy-eyed mountain classmates and caffeinated coach
in the time-faded Polaroid of that wood-paneled trailer
as seriously as if the moth-eaten curtains were Phoenician purple drapes
adorning a fully populated, columned Colosseum
and the desks rose from the floor like marbled stands.

I made first place in our local competition.

After quietly helping form the whispering, shadowed background blur
of exactly one thousand baseball and football games
fought and conquered by my brother and sister,
I, for once, got to share a cake with my family
provided by and baked with my power to use words.

The spring Kentucky state competition was at a university
on the other end of the state,
and the judges would be professors
with capital letters and punctuation following their names
and who lived in pitch-roofed houses
with sidewalks and mailboxes
like on television.

I learned what Columbia blue meant
because we had to wear matching button-up shirts.

The university was large and clean and smelled rich and artificial.
Sienna-bricked architecture tread proudly across campus
with diplomas proclaiming script-printed names
like Augenstein, Zacharias, and Pierce Hall,
which weighed a lot
to a boy who knew grown men
named June-Bug and Chigger.

I fought.

I pulled myself out of the photograph blur until others could see me,
straightened my Columbia blue button-up shirt that my mom had ironed for me,
and strode nervously to the front of the room
to recite the story.

The words flung themselves out of me in a syncopated waterfall,
each drop knowing when to slow or stop,
each stream knowing when to join or crash,
each rapid knowing when to bubble or smooth,
summiting at a bustling stream of words that breathed and saw and felt.
I was speaking into existence an old friend
as if I had been given an incantation
who could comfort and inspire at the same time.
I had never performed so well.

Mr. Weilder received our scorecards and comments.
He said some words before handing them to us,
but I didn’t hear them because I excitedly reached for the card
twenty times in my mind
before he handed it over.

The handwritten words sucked the color from the room
and punched me in the same chest
that had only minutes before been capable of
reciting magic spells with its breath:
“Hard to take seriously with your accent.”

Years later I would drink enough alcohol
to feel the room spinning out of control
(in part to forget moments like that this one)—
this same harbinger spin flung me about the university cafeteria
as if my body were feeling the resultant drag
from the force of thousands of beams of starlight
all leaving my body at once.

Hard to take seriously            Hard to take seriously           Hard to take seriously
Hard to take seriously           Hard to take seriously           Hard to take seriously

The extinguishing would have been complete
if not for the slow coal-ember fire of Mr. Weilder,
who told me that I couldn’t listen to the comments
because there was nothing wrong,
and everything right, with the way I spoke.

His words trickled down the side of my face,
thick with coal sludge.

There were two rounds to go.

My ears and mind were cut by the crisp consonants
and iron-clipped vowels of the recitations given by the other students,
who no doubt hailed from cities that were large enough to be shown on maps.
I quietly swept myself out of the classroom
before anyone could hear me talk.

Sometimes a person will speak truth
that comes to them years before they are able to live it,
a prophecy and testament to the promise and power of words.

In the third and final round, a woman wearing a blazer called my name.
I stood at the podium and felt my ancestors reinforce the steel of my bones.
“Before I speak, I already don’t care what score I get because the first judge mocked how I
talked. I don’t think she was qualified to judge me.”

I promise to that boy standing
to live up to the spell he cast that day.