The Poem I Say Instead of Counting to Ten
Anger management, iambic and portable, administered silently.
I once threw a phone charger at a wall so hard that the plug snapped off inside the socket, and my first thought was not shame. My first thought was that I would now have to explain the socket to my landlord, and that the explanation would probably also end in shouting.
I want to be honest about the kind of angry I was, because there are dangerous angry people and I was not one of them. I was the other kind. Small angry. Constant angry. The anger of printers and parking meters and jar lids. I never hit anyone. I hit objects, and only objects that could not be embarrassed by losing to me.
The bottom, if you can call it that, was a self-checkout machine at a Kroger on a Tuesday. Unexpected item in the bagging area, it said, for the fourth time... about an item I had placed in the bagging area at its own request.
I called that machine something I will not repeat here, at a volume I will also not repeat here, and when I turned around, a woman was steering her son away from me with a hand on his shoulder, the way you steer a child away from weather.
My wife did not threaten to leave me. Dana is not a threatener. She just looked at me across the kitchen that night and said, "You were a person a kid got walked away from today," and she let the sentence sit there until I signed myself up for the Tuesday class in the basement of St. Brigid's.
Anger management, for the record, smells like folding chairs and burnt coffee. Our facilitator was a woman named Denise who wore a lavender cardigan in every temperature and laminated her handouts as if she knew some of us would want to crumple them.
Denise taught us to count to ten.
Everyone teaches you to count to ten. Every list of calming techniques that work starts with breathing and ends with numbers, and I am here to tell you that numbers did nothing for me. Numbers are an empty hallway. I would start walking down it, one, two, three... and my anger would simply wait for me at eight, leaning against the wall, checking its watch.
Worse, some nights the counting felt less like a pause and more like a countdown.
Ten, for a certain kind of person, is a launch.
Then, in week six, a retired trucker named Sal raised his hand and said he did not count. He prayed. Same prayer every time, the one his mother taught him, and the strange part, he said, was that it did not feel like praying. "It's not the God part," Sal said. "It's that the words got somewhere to stand."
Denise nodded like he had said something laminate-worthy. Whatever occupies the mouth, she told us, quiets the hand.
I did not have a prayer. What I had, buried under fifteen years of not writing, was poetry. At nineteen I filled notebooks. Then life happened in the usual boring ways and I stopped. But the week after Sal's confession, stuck behind a Corolla that slept through an entire green light, I felt my palm float up toward the horn, and instead of a number, a stanza surfaced. Four lines. I did not choose them. They arrived on their own, and I said them under my breath while the light went yellow, then red, then green again.
The Corolla woke up. My hand came down.
Nothing in me broke.
You cannot shout in meter. The rhythm takes your fists and teaches them to count syllables instead.
That is the entire trick, and I have since tested it in laboratories more rigorous than any clinic. The pharmacy line, when the insurance rejects the thing it approved last month. On hold with an airline, the same eight bars of synthesizer looping for fifty minutes. Thanksgiving, when my father reviews my career the way other men discuss the weather, with the same calm certainty that none of it can be helped. Four lines, said silently, and my jaw lets go. Anger management, iambic and portable, administered without anyone in the room knowing a poem has gone off like a fire extinguisher.
Here is the part I never told the class.
The poem is not mine, and it is not famous.
It is four lines in my mother's handwriting on an index card I found in her recipe box two years earlier, when we emptied the house. It was filed between her meatloaf and a card that said only "lemon things." I read it once, standing in her kitchen with cardboard boxes around my ankles, put it in my coat pocket... and apparently put it somewhere deeper too, because it came back to me at that green light like it had been waiting for an opening.
It goes like this: This burning is a visitor. It does not pay the rent. Be still, be still, my darling girl. The fire is not the house.
My mother had a temper. I say that lightly, the way our family said everything. She once threw a casserole dish into the yard, whole, and we ate cereal for dinner, and no one ever mentioned the dish... and it stayed in the yard until frost.
She never said sorry in words. She said it in food. Anger was the family accent, and I grew up assuming it was simply mine, inherited like the nose.
What undid me about that card was not the poem. It was the corners. They were soft. Rubbed round the way cardboard only gets when it has been picked up and put down hundreds of times, by the stove, in the doorway, wherever she stood while some fire tried to convince her it lived there.
My mother, who I only ever saw lose, had been fighting the whole time. She had written herself instructions. She had stood over the meatloaf saying them, being still, being still... and none of us ever knew there was a war on.
The temper was the inheritance. It turns out the poem was too.
So I did what people like me eventually do. I wrote about her hands instead of her voice, three lunch-break drafts, and I entered it into a monthly poetry contest, my first submission in fifteen years. It did not win... It did not need to.
Writing it was the first time I understood that I had spent decades writing around my mother when I could simply write about the family instead, and that anger set down on paper weighs less than anger carried in the jaw. If you want to call that healing, Denise certainly would, and then she would laminate it.
We had a graduation of sorts in December. Sal brought donuts. Denise handed out certificates saying we had completed the program, which is a generous way of saying the program had begun to complete us.
Last month Dana and I were at the airport when the gate agent announced our flight would now board from a gate in what sounded like a different area code. Everyone around us made the sound. I did not make the sound. Dana looked at me and said, "You went somewhere just now. Where do you go?"
"Four lines away," I told her.
Somewhere in Ohio there is a wall socket with half a plug still inside it, a small monument to the man I used to be. I like to think the current stops there. Something in me stopped being passed along too, or rather, the right thing finally got passed instead: a visitor shown the door, politely, in meter, by my mother, still saying her poem through my mouth.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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