Poem of the Week

Teacher

Anna Sudderth

I drove hours down a dark, empty road

edged with thick woods

that would break, suddenly, into blank

stretches of field, and the vision of a deer

lurching out from the fields or woods

flickered in my mind over and over,

along with knowing how little I could do

to stop, as fast as I was going, alone.

Did you want to see me?

I made my eyes vigilant,

touching them to each side

of the road, the black

nothing of each mirror, one by one.

But again, this was mostly for show, to know

I could say I had done all I could

if it came to that. What was I trying

to relieve myself of? Or trying

so much to prove? Once, in preschool,

the teacher left our class

alone for a minute, with the instruction

to keep quiet, and when my friend

began to speak, I slapped my hand

over her mouth, as we had been told

to do. I didn’t

hit her, I didn’t hit Kristen, I

remember tearing those words

through sobs, restrained

in the arms of my mother, whom they’d called

to take me home,

seeing I had gone somewhere

beyond language.

But you didn’t know me

in childhood. In the seat beside me,

my stack of poems

you were going to read and, I knew,

tell me to discard. Well,

I’ve discarded them. The smell

of the yard tonight

reminds me of you. Dirt freshly surfaced

in the garden, wild honeysuckle

sweet in the air, and the suggestion

of cows behind the vined fence, white shapes

of their bodies. Though they will not cross

the boundaries of their pasture.

for Louise Glück

The Yale Review · “Teacher” by Anna Sudderth

describe one formal realization or change you made during the writing of this poem.

This poem began as a prose poem that I tinkered with, making superficial changes, for a couple of weeks before ultimately setting it aside. At that point, I just had the first draft of what would become the opening section about driving to Vermont to visit Louise the last time I saw her before she died. I could feel that the prose form wasn’t working, but its compression also felt like the only way I could begin to write about the memory: tunneling through it with tiny descriptive moves. Returning to the poem months later and hitting the Return key at will was thrilling! Leaning into more jagged, irregular lineation rescued the poem—it pushed me toward a way of moving through place and time that felt immediate and surprising.

Anna Sudderth is a poet from Fort Worth, Texas. She currently lives in Austin, where she is pursuing an MFA at the University of Texas’s New Writers Project.