Teaching, Darcy’s father had always told her, was useful work. It was meaningful work, work that made sense and also made money, and it would allow her to be independent. Darcy had been a bookworm and an introvert as a kid—which was nothing to worry about, her father said, because look how smart she had turned out to be, having spent all that time with her nose in a book. He had raised her alone, a single parent, and had praised and encouraged her: Darcy had basked in the warmth of his approval. When she won a full scholarship to college, he had hugged her and wept. She had made him so proud, he said. She would follow her passion and be free to do what she loved.
Her father—he had been dead for almost a year, but she sometimes found herself newly baffled by his failure to get in touch with her—had imagined that Darcy would teach high school students. But because she had stayed in school for as long as possible, she had ended up with a PhD. Now, a newly hired instructor in a department of English, she discovered that teaching was harder and less rewarding than she had hoped. Jobs were scarce, so she knew she was lucky to have landed the position, but she felt no spark or kinship with her students. What Darcy liked best was to be left alone with a pile of books in a quiet room.
*
It was her first semester at the northern Maryland community college, and Darcy had been assigned two sections of composition during the day, and a poetry class—open to members of the public as well as undergraduates—that met for two hours in the early evening. She’d been looking forward to the poetry class (she had written her dissertation on Levertov and the Black Mountain poets), but found that her students, between the ages of eighteen and seventy-five, disliked everything she asked them to read. They didn’t want to analyze poems; they wanted to write them. Wasn’t this supposed to be a writing class?
Yes, it was a writing class, Darcy said, because of the W in the course listing. But the writing of poetry relied on a knowledge and an appreciation for—
“Do you write your own poetry?” Martina asked. Darcy privately referred to Martina as “the interrupter.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time studying it,” she said. She explained to Martina and the others that she had loved poetry since she was young. She had loved the rhythm and the rocking cadences and had gone to sleep at night listening to a recording of children’s verse. By the time she was twelve, she could recite “The Raven” and “In Flanders Fields” and “Ulysses,” her father joining in on his favorite lines: How dull it is to pause, to make an end, / To rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! “Actually,” she said, “rereading and memorization can definitely help to—”
“So you’re saying you don’t write your own poems.” This was Martina again. “Why not?”
“Well—” Darcy stopped. “I suppose it’s because I’m not good enough,” she said.
The students shifted in their seats as she spoke. She had to raise her voice to make herself heard because the classroom was directly above the HVAC and the boiler. The room was narrow and had only one window, and the seminar table was actually four small tables of different heights, which, shoved together, rocked back and forth like shifting tectonic plates. She suggested that they discuss “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop. Would someone read it aloud?
No one volunteered, so Darcy called on Akil. Akil had a stammer, and English was his third or fourth language. He pulverized his way down the length of the poem, Darcy feeling as if she had fed a bolt of fine satin into a shredder. “Good,” she said. “Great.” The fluorescent light—like a giant inverted ice cube tray—sputtered and flickered over their heads. “Let’s talk about the description.”
Dan, a retired sporting goods salesman prone to off-topic comments, said he thought a published poem about a fish should tell what kind of bait or lure was being used; the poet was female, and in Dan’s experience, female fishermen, or fisherwomen—
“Let’s stick to the poem,” Darcy said.
Sharon raised her hand. “I think that dog needs to go out,” she said. “He smells.”
One of the students, Philip, was blind, and he brought his seeing-eye dog to class. The dog, Russ, drowsed on the floor at his owner’s feet, drooling onto the tile.
“Sorry,” Philip said. “We’ve been trying out a new dog food, and it doesn’t seem to agree with him. Could we open the window?”
Darcy attempted to open the window, but it was stuck. “Elizabeth Bishop was a painter as well as a poet,” she said, her back to the students as she struggled fruitlessly with the sash. “Did anyone notice the attention she pays, in the poem, to color?”
No one answered. “Maybe you should go back to the other dog food,” Sharon said, waving a sheaf of paper in front of her. The seeing-eye dog let out a groan.
*
After a ten-minute break, during which Russ was invited to relieve himself on the lawn, the next portion of class was given over to a discussion of the students’ work. This included two poems about dying grandmothers; one poem about owls and their habitats; one poem about Jesus, Lamb and Carpenter; and one about losing the tip of a finger—Dan’s, his hand held up as evidence—to a rotary saw. The students responded with enthusiasm; no matter the caliber, they always admired each other’s work. Amy, a ponytailed student who was majoring in accounting, brought the session to a close by reading a poem the subject of which, Darcy thought, was completely obscure.
Philip, the blind student, raised his hand. “Incarnate,” he said. “I don’t think that word fits in the poem. And it was used incorrectly.” He turned his face—he wore dark, reflective glasses—in Amy’s direction. “It’s a verb or an adjective. Not a noun.”
“Good point,” Darcy said, happy to focus on technical issues. “You might be better off using words that you don’t have to look up in a dictionary.”
Amy’s ponytail twitched. “I hardly looked any of the words up. Are we not allowed to use the dictionary?”
“I like the poem,” said Camille, the oldest member of the class. “I like it a lot. It reminded me of a sonnet.”
“Well, let’s remember that a sonnet,” Darcy said, “is typically fourteen—”
“I said it reminds me of a sonnet.” Camille rapped her fingers against the table. She wore several wedding rings, one for each of the husbands she had survived.
“Back in grade school, I had a teacher who wouldn’t let us use the encyclopedia,” said Tim, who was studying kinesiology and had announced, on the first day of class, that he had signed up for the course because he needed an easy A. “She had them all lined up by her desk, but they were wrapped in plastic and we weren’t allowed to touch them.”
Darcy couldn’t think of an apt response. The students distributed their poems for the following week and then trickled, one by one, into the hall.
She gathered her things and left the building ten minutes later. It was raining. She found Philip and his dog, Russ, sheltered under the awning on the building’s front steps. She asked if they were waiting for a ride.
“No, we take the bus,” Philip said. “Russ is getting on in years, but he still likes the adventure of public transport. We’re just waiting for the rain to let up; I forgot my umbrella.”
“I can drive you,” Darcy said. “Where do you live?”
“You don’t need to do that,” Philip said. But he took her arm.
They headed into the downpour under Darcy’s umbrella. “My car’s right over here,” she said, opening the passenger door. “It’s a green Toyota.” Idiot, she thought. Why did she tell him it was green?
Russ, who was thoroughly soaked, climbed with some effort into the back, Darcy wishing she had a towel for the dog to sit on. She took her place behind the wheel and stashed the umbrella at her feet. The smell of wet fur made her feel like she was sitting in a foul sauna.
“Thanks for the ride,” Philip said. “I probably shouldn’t have made that comment in class.”
Darcy started the car and pulled into traffic. “Do you mean about ‘incarnate’? You were right, though,” she said.
“I wasn’t tactful.”
“I wasn’t either.” She studied his profile; he was handsome, with beautiful prominent bones beneath his skin. “Have you studied poetry before?”
“Not much. I have a degree in journalism,” he said. “But that was ten or twelve years ago. I live nearby, and I like to take evening classes for kicks.”
They stopped at a light. A car to the left of them honked its horn.
“I meant to ask you,” Darcy said. “Do you have someone who can read you the poems?”
Annoyance flickered across Philip’s face, and it occurred to her that his expressions were unpracticed, pure—they weren’t gleaned from the study of other faces. “Do I have someone?” he asked.
Darcy blushed. “I only meant . . . If it would be helpful, I could read them to you,” she said. “So you wouldn’t have to hear them for the first time in class.”
“Ah.” His expression smoothed itself out.
The light turned green; another car honked.
“Do you have your lights on?” Philip asked. “Maybe that’s why they’re honking. You’re supposed to turn on your lights when it’s raining.”
“My lights are on.” Should a blind person be correcting my driving? Darcy turned left, passing a fire station and a park with a playground.
“How about meeting for coffee before class on Tuesday?” Philip asked.
They decided on a time and a place.
“Russ! Stop scratching.” Philip rolled down the window and put out his hand. “You can turn off your wipers now,” he said. “The rain is gone.”
*
At night when she wasn’t prepping for class or grading papers, Darcy wondered if she would be better off with a different career. It was possible that her father was wrong and that she had no business being a teacher. Before accepting the job, she had imagined that, even at a community college, there would be a certain quiet camaraderie, a few evenings with wine and books, some lively talk. But most of her extended conversations on campus were either with the administrator, Val, or with the custodian, a man named Hank who liked to park himself in her office doorway and expostulate about the upcoming hunting season. Her colleagues, many of them adjuncts or part-timers, were buried beneath an avalanche of student papers. They spent their lives hunched over their desks, like rabbits in a series of darkened pens.
Darcy’s father had died feeling so proud of her—my daughter the professor!—but he had worked for thirty-five years in the building trades, a nuts-and-bolts guy, and his mantra had always been to anticipate what the customer needs. Darcy wanted her “customers” to read widely, to sense the infinite possibilities of language, to express themselves clearly. But they didn’t care about clarity and they objected to almost everything on the syllabus.
They seemed to want from Darcy something she lacked or didn’t know how to provide.
*
Typically, she met with students in her office, but because Philip had proposed that they get a coffee, she found him in the student union, at the Daily Grind. He arrived ahead of her and ordered two coffees and two blueberry scones. While Darcy thanked him and took the student poems out of her bag, Philip reached for the sugar, his hand moving like a small, graceful animal as he opened two paper packets and poured their contents into his cup. Darcy wondered whether his hands understood the world independently of the rest of him, artful navigators in a permanent dusk. She noticed his wrist with its beautiful bones, the dark hairs curling over his sleeve.
“You probably want to ask me how I went blind,” he said. “I was three and a half. I had a tumor on the optic nerve. Sometimes I think I remember what it was like to see, but I’m not sure anymore. It’s a general impression, and of course it’s faded. I’m sure you know that Milton went blind. Russ and I are both Milton fans.”
The dog dozed at their feet. He was sluggish, Darcy thought, and a bit overweight, especially for a seeing-eye dog; he looked like a golden barrel with legs. “I’ve got twelve pages here,” she said. “So I think we should start.” The first poem in her folder was “The Trouble with Cats.” She read it slowly, twice, then sipped her coffee.
“I don’t suppose you want to hear my opinion,” Philip said.
Darcy told him that it would make more sense for him to share his feedback during class. She read Martina’s poem—a dozen lines about a fox—and a longer work Freya had written about her fondness for the great horned owl. Why so many animal poems? she wondered.
Toward the bottom of the stack she found Philip’s poem, “Bed,” which consisted of sixteen lines of erotic verse. A woman’s breasts were described as “flushed fruit,” while between her legs ran a “relief map of liquid silk.” He wrote of yearning like a person who knew what it was. Darcy wondered if he had heard her intake of breath.
“You obviously don’t need to read mine out loud,” Philip said. “I’ll recite it in class.”
“Yes. Good.” The last two poems were “A Worm in My Ventricle” (comic verse on the subject of heartache) and “I Am a Way,” a sort of mystical travel poem, part of it set in a desert, part in the snow.
They finished their coffee. “Well, that’s it,” Darcy said. “I need to stop by my office. But we’ll see each other in class?”
“You’ll see me,” Philip said. “But I should probably point out that—”
“Oh. God, yes. I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine. I’m kidding.” He reached across the table and gently tapped the back of her hand. His skin was warm.
“Okay, then.” Darcy felt the color rise in her face. Two women from the provost’s office smiled in her direction as she gathered her things.
*
In early October, Val, the English department’s administrator, asked Darcy how her classes were going. Darcy told her that the composition sections, though not exciting, were fine; but in the poetry class, she was stymied by her students’ lack of interest in the work she assigned. They cared only about their own poems, which, frankly—
“What about your blind student?” Val asked. “Philip. I heard that he’s writing some juicy stuff.”
Darcy had just reread Philip’s most recent submission, “Braille,” in which the speaker reads a woman’s body with his hands. “He’s . . . the exception. He writes very well.”
“I’ll bet he does.” Val pushed a pencil into the electric sharpener and asked if Darcy was planning to sleep with Philip before the end of the term. “It’s better if you can wait until the grades are in.”
“I’m not going to sleep with him,” Darcy said. “He’s my student.”
Val raised her eyebrows, which were already penciled at a higher-than-average elevation near the top of her head. “True, but he’s probably close to your age and he’s definitely good-looking. Would you sleep with him if he wasn’t your student?”
Darcy attempted to quash the mental image of Philip’s hands—the crescent moons of his fingernails—unfastening the buttons on the front of her dress. “I’m not sleeping with anyone,” she muttered. The last person she had slept with, eight months before, was an instructor of aerobics, a man who had leaped out of bed in the middle of the night to grunt through a hundred and fifty sit-ups, his pale feet hooked beneath her dresser. “Who told you about his poems?”
Val tidied a stack of paper. “You work here long enough . . .” She shrugged. “I heard that he buys you lunch. And you drive him home sometimes after class.”
“I drove him home once. Actually, twice,” Darcy said. “It was raining both times. And he doesn’t buy me lunch.” Making a mental note not to allow Philip to pay for her coffee, she hijacked Val’s favorite pencil, the one with the yellow rubber creature where the eraser would normally be. “Do you think I could teach something different next term? Maybe I could teach the American survey. Or a theater class. You know I did my master’s thesis on twentieth-century—”
“Nope. No can do. Ron teaches the survey.” Val held out her hand for the pencil. “And we don’t teach theater here. Harold thinks theater is too abstract.”
“Abstract?”
“Don’t get him started on the subject.” Harold was the chair of the department, a stooped, bald man with tufts of hair that sprouted like sheaves of wheat from his ears. During her job interview he had ignored Darcy’s CV and asked her the same tiresome question over and over: How did she plan to turn community college students into published writers and poets?
“So it’s comp and poetry again, in the spring?” Darcy asked.
Val confirmed that it was.
*
The following Tuesday at the Daily Grind, Darcy read Philip the poems submitted by the other students, beginning with twenty lines from Dan about scoring a birdie on a long par four.
“This must be painful for you,” Philip said. “All these mediocre efforts. Not that my poems are much better.”
“Yours are better,” she said, and immediately regretted that she had said it.
“Not by much.” Philip smiled. “You probably know Milton’s poem about being blind: ‘When I Consider How My Light Is Spent.’”
Yes, of course Darcy knew it.
“That’s what poetry is supposed to be,” Philip said. “‘And that one Talent which is death to hide / Lodged with me useless . . .’ If Milton were alive today, he wouldn’t write about golf. Would he, Russ?”
The dog lay immobile at their feet while Darcy shuffled through the rest of the students’ poems. Philip’s submission was called “Soft.” He seemed to sense that she was reading it, that it had come to the top of the pile. “Probably not my best,” he said. “Next semester I’ll sign up for statistics or astronomy and give up on the poems.”
“I hope you won’t do that,” Darcy said.
Philip was silent and seemed to wait for her to explain.
“The off-rhyme in the first half—‘quench’ and ‘recompense,’” she said. “It’s pretty good.”
“A for effort, then.” He shrugged and said something about poems not being judged by half-decent first halves. “Are you sure I can’t get you a scone?”
“Thanks. I’m not hungry.” Darcy was hungry. But she had messaged Philip the day before, telling him not to buy her food or a coffee (she had brought her own, in a thermos, lukewarm). She watched him finish the rest of his scone and lick his fingers. “I hope it’s not rude of me to ask,” she said. “But . . . how do you write? Do you compose entirely in your mind and then type?”
“Voice recognition software,” Philip said. “I have to speak in-cred-i-bly clear-ly.” He enunciated for effect, and Darcy noticed the tiny chip in one of his teeth. “I don’t mind you asking,” he said. “It took me six years to get my journalism degree. And now I work in online customer service. A great job for the blind—that’s what I’ve been told.”
His voice was taut; he sounded angry, and Darcy wanted to offer him some kind of encouragement, something that would convince him that his poems, though clearly not perfect, were more than half decent. They were worthwhile.
“Is that it?” he asked. “Are we done?”
“No, there’s one more.” The final submission—a six-line poem from Akil—was cryptic, nearly indecipherable. While she read it, slowly, twice, Philip tilted his head toward the ceiling: his listening posture. Darcy studied the subtle crescent-shaped scar on his chin.
When she finished reading, Philip nodded. “I’m not sure what that was about. He has a thought, I suppose, or a feeling, but he doesn’t know how to give it shape. He doesn’t know what it is.”
This sounded to Darcy like a description of the human condition. She looked at her watch; it was time to go.
*
She had hoped that rapport in the poetry class would improve as the semester went on, but the reverse appeared to be happening. Week by week, the mood in the narrow classroom was increasingly glum, the students trading whispered remarks when Darcy spoke. It didn’t help that Philip, who missed the rolling of eyes and other facial cues during discussion, was a discerning critic. After he described Janelle’s poem as “unintentionally amusing,” Janelle moved her seat to the other side of the room, claiming, belatedly, to be allergic to dogs.
They moved on to Amy’s submission, “Sunrise at Dawn.” Dan said that he generally got up well before sunrise during deer-hunting season. He liked to be settled in the deer stand with a cup of coffee by six o’clock. Janelle said she had a sister named Dawn, so she loved the poem, even though she hadn’t seen that particular sister, who had a problem with hoarding, in three or four years.
Darcy asked them to look at the description in the poem, keeping in mind what they had discussed during a previous class.
“There’s no real metaphor,” Philip said. He lifted his chin in Darcy’s direction while suggesting that the best works of literature relied on the benefit of comparing one thing to another.
“I like the poem the way it is.” Tim crossed his arms. “What’s she going to compare the sunrise to? Sunset in reverse?”
Darcy felt a headache pitching camp at the base of her brain. She took off her glasses and wiped them clean on the hem of her shirt. Without her lenses, the classroom was a soft, velutinous world full of indefinite objects, every landmark reinvented.
“There is no point in comparing things if they are different,” Akil said.
“Exactly!” Camille rapped her wedding rings on the tabletop.
“I guess I should have written about sex,” Amy said, looking at Philip.
“Okay, I think it’s time for a break.” Darcy put her glasses back on. “Ten minutes?”
The students filed out of the room. During mid-class breaks—scheduled mainly for the instructor’s benefit—they tended to gather at the end of the hall in front of a bank of vending machines.
Philip stayed behind in the classroom. “Who’s up next?” he asked, his dark glasses reflecting the overhead lights.
“Sharon,” Darcy said. Sharon had submitted a dozen couplets about the virtues of stay-at-home motherhood, as well as a rhyming list of reasons to believe in God. “Janelle didn’t submit this time, so we’ll finish with Ca-mille and then you.”
Philip leaned down and stroked Russ’s mallet-shaped head. “Mine is going straight into the trash can after class. I wanted it to be subtle, with that repeated phrase at the end. But it’s heavy-handed. And I think it clunks.”
It did clunk, Darcy thought. Still, the repeated phrase was worth saving; she had recited it aloud that morning, several times, on her way to work. She looked at the dog. He was old, but his fur was exquisite: lustrous and glossy. She wanted to run her hands through it but knew she shouldn’t, because Russ was a working dog. He was useful; he had a job. As if he knew what she was thinking, Russ looked up at her with sympathetic eyes. She held his lucid gaze for a moment. How much easier, she thought, that he didn’t need words.
*
“You don’t look good,” Val said, when Darcy stopped by after her Wednesday comp class. “Do you want a vitamin? Something to pep you up?” In the bottom drawer of her desk, Val kept a pharmacopeia of herbal supplements and drops. Darcy suspected that she ran a naturopathy business on the side.
“I’m just tired, I think. I haven’t been sleeping.” Darcy sat down in the chair next to Val’s desk and studied the signs taped to her inbox: Wait til you see my other desk, and Deadlines be damned. “Val, did you ever consider careers other than this one? Or wish you worked somewhere other than here?”
“You’re calling what I do at this place a career?” Val’s eyebrows shot upward into her hairline. “I’ve had this job for nineteen years, and here’s how I try to see it: No one’s going to hire me to be a surgeon.”
“Did you want to be a surgeon?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Val readjusted a bra strap and stood. “I’m going to make a new pot of coffee. Though I don’t know why anyone would drink this stuff. Look at the color of the water coming out of the tap.”
Darcy suggested that she let the water run for a minute, in case it might clear—but Val had already filled the carafe.
“I feel like I should be better at this,” Darcy told her, slumping down in her chair. “I should be better at being a teacher.”
Val finished making the coffee—it infused the room with a boggy odor—and stood in front of Darcy with her hands on her hips. “Do you know how long Harold’s been here?”
“No.” Harold struck Darcy as timeless—like a relic from an archaeological dig.
“Forty-three years. He was here when the college was founded.”
“Okay.” Darcy straightened in her chair. She expected Val to follow this comment up with some words of encouragement, but Val was apparently finished with their conversation. She had some copying to do, she said. “And I’m sure you’re busy.” She looked pointedly at Darcy, who took the hint and left, wondering if she should have accepted whatever remedy Val had on hand.
*
By the next morning, the weariness Darcy felt had turned into a flu, and she spent the weekend shivering under a jumble of blankets, her students’ papers unread in a stack on the floor. She missed her comp class on Monday, crawling out of bed on Tuesday afternoon when her landlord showed up to look at the bathroom faucet, which had been leaking for quite some time. While he turned the water on and off and on again, he delivered a monologue about his daughter, “a real ray of light to me,” he said, who was study-ing at Darcy’s college to become a nurse. Did Darcy know her? No, unfortunately she didn’t. The landlord smiled, shaking his head. “I can’t think how to say it,” he told her. “I have two boys, both good young men, but Lianna is different. She’s—” He made a delicate spiraling motion in the air with his hand, then shook his head and returned to the faucet. When he left an hour later, Darcy showered, forced herself to eat a piece of toast, and walked out the door.
She hadn’t read the students’ work or made any preparations for class. Other than Philip, who was absent (oh god, she had forgotten to cancel their meeting), they were waiting, desultorily, in their usual chairs. The room was stifling. Darcy opened her briefcase, which was empty: She had left her folder of poems at home. She blew her nose, then killed a few minutes with some rambling comments about a project due at the end of the term, feeling as if her skull had been packed with steel wool.
On the opposite side of the room, Camille turned to Amy. “What is she talking about? I can’t hear her.”
Amy shrugged. The classroom was noisy as well as overheated, with the rumbling boiler, directly beneath them, kicking in.
“You need to speak up,” Sharon said. “We can’t hear.”
Darcy apologized and explained that she’d had a cold. “Could we open the window at least?” Tim asked.
Darcy was closest to the window. She stood up and, first with annoyance, then with a feeling of desolation, pushed with both her fists against the sash. It didn’t budge. She had lied to her students when they asked her if she ever wrote her own poems. In the vacant months after her father died, she had experienced a sudden, urgent need to describe him, to translate her grief into words. She had spent countless hours trying to memorialize the swaying baritone of his voice, still heard in dreams, and the row of thick, familiar calluses—when she was young, she had called them lily pads—on his hands. But on the page, despite her efforts, he became ordinary, unimportant. And it was a torment, Darcy thought, this failure to render him or her love for him in language. She tore up the poems: Her father’s faith in her had been misplaced, and his absence left a hole in her life that could not be repaired.
She leaned her forehead against the glass, but a moment later found that Martina, the interrupter, was standing beside her, and together they managed to force the window open. Perhaps the best thing to do, Darcy thought, as Martina returned quietly to her seat, would be to crawl through the window and never return. The mid-November air cooled her skin.
In the classroom behind her, she heard someone cough. “I would like to share what I have written today,” Akil said. Akil seldom spoke without being called on, but now, raising his voice to be heard above the whum whum whum of the boiler, he began stumbling, line by line, through a poem about his son, a boy of six who had recently developed a love of the stars.
Darcy sat down.
When Akil was finished, Sharon read “The Lord’s Best Reasons,” which might or might not have been about a long-ago abortion, and Tim followed up with a poem several lines of which were copied directly from Robert Frost.
“That almost reminds me of Robert Frost,” Camille said.
Amy delivered a dozen verses told from the point of view of a horse in the Civil War. Her poems were terrible, Darcy thought, every single one of them. But the Civil War poem made Darcy remember the afternoon almost thirty years earlier when her father had set her on the back of a spotted pony, its mane spread out in front of her like silk.
“It’s not very good yet,” Amy said. “But I’ve been trying to make the rhyme not so obvious—you know, like you said.”
Before Darcy could reply, Philip opened the door and walked in with his guide dog, Russ. A river of cold air swept through the room between the door and the window, the scattered poems on the table rising and twirling as if caught in a storm.
The dog, usually so lumbering and phlegmatic, appeared to be stirred by the commotion: Still bound by his harness, he reared back on his haunches and leaped—a lovely, chubby, golden missile—and captured one of the poems in his teeth. It was a startling, singular moment, Darcy thought, indecipherable yet worth attempting to put into words. She would ask her students to describe it, later. She would attempt to describe it, too, and though her efforts would probably never succeed, she would keep trying because, like anyone else in the room, she could learn; she could be taught.
__________________________________
From “How My Light Is Spent” Patient, Female by Julie Schumacher. Used with permission of the publisher, Milkweed Editions. Copyright © 2026.
