Free Paper Covers Rock by Jenny Hubbard

Moby-Dick is a symbol. If he were just a regular black whale, he wouldn’t be. So Melville made him white, like a ghost. White is innocent. A month ago, so was I. Miss Dovecott believes that “loss of innocence” is the “overarching theme of Western literature.” Maybe; I haven’t read enough of it to say. But her definition is deficient.
Loss of innocence
is not the small and/or giant steps that lead to the gray areas, the complexities, that are the substance of adulthood.
Loss of innocence
is the knowledge that your brain, no matter how much you cajole it, can never make your heart pure. My brain has been so unfaithful. It has tricked me into alliances I didn’t even know I’d formed.
    Lovely in Her Bones
    First thing Monday morning (yesterday), Miss Dovecott asks us to get out our syllabi; we are going to make a changebecause we need more in-depth work with the concept of metaphor.
    Syllabi. All of our teachers must have taken Latin. I take Latin, too, but I’m not in the honors section. Does Miss Dovecott have ulterior motives for replacing the innocuous “The Author to Her Book,” by Anne Bradstreet—which, for the record, is rife with implied comparison—with “I Knew a Woman,” by Theodore Roethke? Glenn is certain that she does, and I have to admit, he might have a point. For homework, we are to track, through all four stanzas, the poem’s use of metaphor. It’s the dirtiest poem I’ve read in my entire life.
    (X-Rated) Homework
    “That woman in the poem must have been hot,” Ben Wilson says to me this morning as I sling my backpack onto my desk to retrieve my homework. I look at Miss Dovecott to see if she has heard. She is smiling, pulling at the tip of her ponytail. I would like to take a bath with her and undo that ponytail, see her hair fan out in the water like a mermaid’s.
    “Teddy Row-Whoever was p-whipped,” says Jovan Davis.
    “Yep,” says Ben.
    Joe Bonnin says to Miss Dovecott as we’re settling in, “I can’t believe that poem was in our book. You finally assigned us something I didn’t mind reading.”
    We are paying attention now, watching to see how she will wade through the sexy imagery in the poem, and I wonder whatever happened with the penis drawing, and though Glenn has refused to own up to it, I am pretty darn sure itwas part of The Plan. “Well,” she says, “let’s first try to surmise what Roethke might ultimately be trying to say. If he is speaking to you, what is he telling you? Bailey?”
    “Um, maybe he’s saying that a woman can change your life.”
    “Good, good. Change it how?”
    More hands go up. She lets Bailey Richards continue. “Maybe change the way you view time?”
    “Right. Well done. So, Ben, how does the speaker view time differently?”
    “Um, I’m not sure.”
    “Look at the poem,” she says, “and see what you can find. Maybe in the last stanza.”
    “ ‘I measure time by how a body sways,’ ” says Jovan.
    “Right, Jovan. So what do you think that’s all about?”
    “I guess it has something to do with, you know, boom-chicka-boom?”
    Most guys are laughing. “Jovan,” Miss Dovecott says, “let’s try to look beyond that aspect of the poem for just a minute.”
    “I don’t know if I can,” says Jovan. “I mean, I’m not trying to be a smart-ass, but if it’s right there in front of you, you’re gonna look at it.”
    The whole class is laughing now, and when Miss Dovecott raises her hand to calm us down, we quiet, but our eyes are all over one another’s, trying to measure who will pick up where Jovan left off.
    “Glenn,” she says. “What do you think about the poem’s last line?”
    “To be honest, I don’t think much of it. The poem would have been better without it. I think the line that comes before it is much stronger. Because isn’t the message of the poem that he learns from the woman? He
lives
to learn from her, he says. Time has nothing to do with it. He doesn’t care about time.”
    “Yeah,