School Days

Here's a poem that I wrote as an undergraduate in Wayne Dodd's class at Ohio University in 1992. He liked it somewhat, and I've tried to get it published many times without success. So, here it is, an early example of my first real poetry. School Days Remember that school smell of bus exhaust and sour milk, new notebooks and fresh paper, clothes spiced with summer perfume, fall leaves dying and dogs on long chains barking, maybe laughing? Remember that school smell of new chalk on silver trays, old textbooks given out, football odors in dirty locker rooms, fresh cut grass not killed, not yet?