Of The Education Of Children

I was planted, a crop
not a boy but with headlong technique, everything in me telling
to be coursed through with water and emptiness

* * *

The blank was worth tending
a matter of tight, small discretions
separating from youth like a bee

It's just silence
I've been talking about

Into hills I tried things I was made of
What was not in my memory, not math
yet patched all together
I required this armor
"wrestling with old champions body against body"

* * *

Scribbling down the solution
"by little light attacks"

A life is at odds and we solve it
a shadow itself

"Understanding makes profit of everything—arranges, acts, and
reigns,"
gives knowledge out in a swan

Virtue wasn't a mountain, not a field
or was it me brooding

* * *

"Too ill to instruct others,"
this awareness of slow moving and ditch
of the past of the subject

A few lumps on the ground like a book

"Mixing with men is wonderfully useful"
but hard practice

* * *

"For our boy, a closet, a garden, the table and bed, solitude,
company, morning and evening, all hours will be the same, all
places will be his study"

* * *

He's in philosophy, and mingled
let him forgive it
I have been happy in rooms

Gambling with pocket, with babble
"he will not say his lesson as do it"
and the unit is character,
"repeated in actions"

* * *

Rising to beg and confounding
I hear it now, in our ears