PROFESSORIAL KNOWLEDGE   I see the night as an old professor sitting quietly at the front of the classroom wearing a gray cap, holding a broken piece of chalk   he is there to tell the day how to retain its identity even when you lose the very light that defines you   how to remain omnipotent a teller of stories,   even when your opaque knowledge has escaped through the last moon   the day defines its own brightness defies instruction and fidgets in class uninterested in the equations of twilight the transcendent philosophies of blackness   the day leaves class early never studies the mysteries of plato the quiet obsidian sky   misses assignments about dusk and Dante   until one day, a deep fog falls the day finds it has missed the contrast of shadow, the contradiction of itself   and heads back to the old room where the professor seems to be gone   but on the desk there is an ancient map of the galaxy worn and weary, but oh so patient   the student looks up finds the professor waiting for him at the top of Stonehenge in the falling light       Orginally Published in: Iodine Poetry Journal Summer 2008 By Connie Post

A QUIET SEAMSTRESS   Oct 24, 2005   A four way stop the white lines fall beneath the black wheels of my car   a bus pulls over in front of me a newscast leaks out of the radio….. “Rosa Parks dead at age 92” the bus seems to hesitate knowing it has been forever changed   Its flashing lights burning throughout the whole city through the epicenter of change through Montgomery, all the towns flattening under the wheels of complacent buses each driving through the night looking for their lost seamstress   each stopping, starting finding a known route As if catharsis had found its way     originally Published in Carquinez Poetry Review 2007 No. 5   By Connie Post

License

You come in the house, flinging a temporary slip of paper

That tells me you can drive now

Words of congratulations fall over my lips

As you tuck your newfound freedom into your purse

And with one look, let me know that everything will change

I began to recall snippets of the last months

The hours logged in, on tan bucket seats

My white knuckles hanging onto the door

Rolled in with wild turns and sudden stops

Gasps of indiscretion and sighs of temporary insanity

The times you would check with me

To make sure it was okay to go

To make sure there was enough time

It was only two days ago that I watched

You take your first drive alone

Your first avalanche into adulthood

And it was then I remembered how the seat of my first car felt

The slightly torn vinyl just beneath my thigh

The pennies never pulled out from the creases

The uncertainty of speed limits or how I was to find my way home

This morning

I watch you walk outside into the cold air

Keys in hand and a token jacket you will throw in the back seat

You adjust a sweater you’ve had since you were thirteen

I peer through the blinds so you won’t know I am watching

Behind the curtains of separation

And know it is I who must yield, this time

I stand for what is like years, and all the while,

I tug at the moments, like the pennies I could not pull from the seats

Grab hold of them and let them tinge my fingers with copper and memory

Watch you find the settings to your mirrors

So you can see behind you, in front of you

And know that it was I who resides in the blind spot

Where  I know I must move back far enough

So you will someday see me waiting here, watching over you

In a distant passing lane

Originally Published California Quarterly 2004 Volume 30 No. 4

by Connie Post

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