Teaching English Nine With LaryngitisChristine Potter“O, wind, rend open the heat...” --H.D. As if it could amplify things, I push chalk so hard against the green slate it powders my knuckles yellow. My words fray at their edges like pages of my students’ notebooks in May. Outside, trees roll their lovely heads in wind and the sun is huge, huge. No one cares about H.D. except to laugh at her real name. I write apostrophe is when the poem addresses a person or a thing, like heat or a Grecian Urn. O, shining morning, let me breathe your sweet air without coughing; clear my throat with the cold blue water of your sky. Let this light-struck day stretch athletic arms around me. Hoist me out of this school, or at least discover some unknown healing power in metaphor and give me back my voice. There are three weeks left until Finals, ten long minutes until the end of the period. In the fourth row, by the window, Mary who doesn’t do homework fills in the “O” of her vocabulary workbook in sparkling, apple-scented pink. 
Christine Potter, 2002
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