Pat Anthony is a recently retired special education teacher and parent of an adult child who has grown up with Asperger’s. She loves the serendipity of people with autism together with the challenges and wisdom that accompany them. Writing is a way to frame experience, poetry the language.
For the Boy Who Flawlessly Retells Entire Movies
Thoughts shape themselves
into loops and lines graphite filling
emptiness letters words s t r e t c h e d
into fragments spilled from the void
accidental wanderings wonderings freed
by the torrent to ride the riffle, join the stream.
There is this going on of it,
wetness spreading up the banks
fears across the page both blurring
into stories now seeping past
the truth of either stream or bank
mind or heart
the soak and crumble
only to be
carried away
again
to lodge in some crevasse and yet
at the sound of some note
we’ve yet to find,
we hear it all
repeat
repeat.
No Straight Line to It
She got to where she couldn’t stand
the arched eyebrows of the unschooled
appalled by skipping feet attached to
the little girl who only walked on blue
tiles, the boy who pencil strummed
along the railing, his method precise
and sure as a timpanist.
She wanted to tell those onlookers that
even mockingbirds cartwheeled their way
through summer days, wings like whirlygigs,
no straight line to it.
Shoots wandering every which way off
the pea vines in the kitchen garden, baby
hedge balls littering the ground just by being
caught out in a thunder storm.
One day she dared to skip all the way to the
teachers’ lounge, giggled with the children,
proclaimed a Friday dance, decided feet
should celebrate the day along with smiles.
Watches now as real mockingbirds wing away
in a place distant from that one, knows halls
have gone empty. Remembering, her heart is full.
Flight
Today one of the children
with autism works his math
from left to right
with his finger
in his head
a stack of hundreds
four deep
sends the 697 answer
(correct)
with a mouse
click
his pencil is gone
to the floor
again
he perches
like a bird
who needs nothing
but air
and a flap
of wing to soar
scores at level 5
in the math room
decorated by the artistic
boy with Asperger’s who comes
in the summers to splash yellow
sunlight on these walls
I wrote a 1000 words today, he said
as he exited the season, ideas
hovering and darting around him
like a hummingbird in search of the perfect
shade of red
I can still see him in his stocking cap
beard stubble darkening his face
even as I bend to pick up this
pencil and the bird takes flight.
Hyperlexia Journal 