Poetry and Faces

This is the time of year when a number of ConVal graduates who are on winter break from college stop by to say hello. One of them dropped in at the English office the other day and stood there, smiling expectantly.    

It was awkward. Jill Lawler and I had both had her in classes, but neither of us could come up with her name. Jill finally took the rap. ‘Your face is familiar,’ she said, ‘but I can’t place the name.’
    
Kristen Drake graciously identified herself. ‘I couldn’t remember your name, either,’ I admitted. ‘But I remember a poem you wrote in my Creative Writing class. It was about putting together a jigsaw puzzle, how you have to start with the edge pieces.’
    
She looked surprised and pleased. ‘I remember that poem! It turned out to be about figuring out who you are.’
    
‘It was a good poem,’ I said. ‘The final line was something like, ‘and the last piece is always sky.’’
    
My memory grows less reliable every day, but for some reason I retain these shards of language. I can walk down the halls at ConVal, cataloguing the familiar but nameless faces: ‘She wrote the poem about cowboy boots, because she moved here from Texas, and he’s the one who wrote the funny story about being a teenage vampire, and that’s the guy who wrote about writer’s block. He said it was like standing outside a locked house, looking in the windows.’
    
Sometimes it’s a name, not a face, that triggers the memories. The other day somebody mentioned Tawni Bush, who has done great things as a chef since graduating from our culinary arts program. He brought her up as an example of a student who followed a non-traditional career pathway. But I remember her as one of my favorite poets. She couldn’t spell at all and her punctuation was shaky, but she had an eye and a voice and an overflowing heart, which is all a poet really needs.
    
Then there are the really astounding talents, like Claire Villeneuve, whom I recognized at The Bagel Mill a few weeks ago as she was smearing cream cheese on my toasted poppy-seed. At first, I wasn’t sure it was her, but my brain was reeling with lines and images from her poems -- the foot going through the drywall, and the graffiti under the bridge.
    
‘Are you still writing?’ I asked her.
    
‘Yes, some,’ she said.
    
‘Good!’ I said with more emotion than I intended, and she looked startled.
    
This is the last week of the first semester. Next week, I’ll have to start learning a hundred new names and faces. The old ones, the names I learned last fall, will go back into my faulty memory banks, where many of them will disappear. Afterwards, all that will remain of them, perhaps, will be their indelible stories: his first deer, the 1,200-lb. Belgian horse she loved and trained, the prom date who broke his heart, and the summer she left home to join a traveling carnival.