Elementary Schooling

In every classroom of my elementary school,

Unpartitioned panes of glass from hip to ceiling stood.

Over and over the learning days

Through quiet observing and landscape gazing,

I shutter-snapped portraits of a changing world,

Collecting unplanned lessons within my mind’s eye:

Compressed for safekeeping, reduced to locket-size.

Until even now onward, some thirty years plus,

When presented with an architect’s constructed vignette,

Instinctually I’m instructed, as birds are to nest,

To study and write or contemplate that window’s habitus.

I find it irresistibly appealing

This elementary schooling

Gained from simply framing

A transparent pane of glass.

        ~Volpini Amentum Arete Anemone