Teaching "Sonny

I think of them, their predictable walk
from cell to breakfast -- maybe they count
the steps from cell door to hall’s end, count
the seconds it takes for the locks to release, count
the paces to the chain-link fence, count the guards
at each checkpoint. So much counting:
waiting for meals, mail, visitors, waiting
for lights out, waiting for light.
I think of them, some in coveted solitary cells,
sitting on thin mattresses, regulation blue shirts
with designated numbers, regulation socks
and sneakers on the floor. Reading.
I see the thick green paperback of short stories
with the girl on the cover, a girl in an orange
dress, lying on sun-splotched grass. Reading.
She is from a time when girls wore petticoats,
laced shoes, and waited for men to come courting.
I think of them, sinking into “Sonny’s Blues,”
under fluorescent light, on a wool blanket,
dingy sheets, breathing stale plexiglassed air,
the pulse of eighty men per floor.
“And he’d always been a good boy, he hadn’t ever
turned hard or evil or disrespectful,” our narrator
tells us about his brother. I think of them, backs
against the wall, turning the pages, forgetting for a moment
where they are in their sentences, present only
on the timeless page where Baldwin writes,
“There isn’t any other tale to tell,
it’s the only light we’ve got
in all this darkness.”