Her voice

like a conductor motioned me

forward, close, up to the front,

the black slate’s letters were crisp

streaming their high music in through my eye-

glassless eyes.  Don’t be afraid of the blurring

or the flares, they can fix that, she said, leading

me into the Green Circle beside her desk

three or four chairs

for slow readers. When I saw sparrow

or suggest I thought surgery and how would I

live without my eyes they would pluck

leaving only spiders flashing, blinking,

my eyeballs sliced midway like corks, and

dipped in chalkdust. Her surprise

as I bent my head into the book which

had an inside & an outside

sheets of rain sealing the margins,

she came to me and opened another book

& another of large letters & smaller ones.

I was braided, finally, onto pages, filling,

                 and I saw how tall she was,

my conductor, a white pine all her needles

threading even more music into me

till I laughed when she read “germ of sadness”

and I heard “wheat germ” doing its crunching,

and for all of us, because it was April and nearly

my first full year of school

had passed without reading. I heard her

click the fluorescents off—Look children, we have plenty

of light, she said, Look at your fingernails & your neighbor’s

teeth.  Spring light!  she said, and it was very old, newly

arriving from the long Universe brushing us,

here in our Northern Hemisphere.

—Judith Vollmer is the author of five full-length books of poetry, including The Apollonia Poems, awarded the University of Wisconsin Press Four Lakes Prize (2017).  She is recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; and fellowships and visiting artist residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, the American Academy in Rome, and elsewhere.  Other publication prizes include the Brittingham, the Cleveland, and the Center for Book Arts (limited edition) awards.  Her collection Reactor was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award and was featured in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.  Vollmer’s poetry and criticism have appeared in Poetry International, The Georgia Review, Poet Lore, The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire, The Women’s Review of Books, and Great River Review, among many others.  She lives in Pittsburgh and teaches in the low-residency MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation at Drew University.