Here you will find the Poem Going to School of poet Karl Shapiro
What shall I teach in the vivid afternoon With the sun warming the blackboard and a slip Of cloud catching my eye? Only the cones and sections of the moon. Out of some flaking page of scholarship, Only some foolish heresy To counteract the authority of prose. The ink runs freely and the dry chalk flows Into the silent night of seven slates Where I create the universe as if It grew out of some old rabbinic glyph Or hung upon the necessity of Yeats. O dry imaginations, drink this dust That grays the room and powders my coat sleeve, For in this shaft of light I dance upon the intellectual crust Of our own age and hold this make-believe Like holy-work before your sight. This is the list of books that time has burned, These are the lines that only poets have learned, The frame of dreams, the symbols that dilate; Yet when I turn from this dark exercise I meet your bright and world-considering eyes That build and build and never can create.
