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[ 2 poems by Richard Chess ]
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In That Classroom, He Dwelled
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1.
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Our attention wrapped him in a sacred scroll.
That’s how intensely we regarded him, eager
for whatever spark—one of his insights,
one of ours—would ignite him.
And when it came, the calf-skin parchment
blazed, but the letters were not consumed
by the flames. They were freed from story, song, and law.
Then it was up to us, students and our guide, to gather
the consonants and vowels, adrift like confetti,
and arrange them to reveal
secrets hidden by the plain, original text.
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2.
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Of course none of this is true.
No unburnt alphabet. No fire. No Torah scroll
in which he was wrapped. And the students’ attention?
The fierce concentration? That devotion?
Who do you think they were? Monastics?
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I was his student, too.
After he closed the classroom door,
turned to the text at hand, and read it
aloud, he’d ask the class, his congregation,
what we heard. No right or wrong,
he assured them. You hear what
you hear. Thus began the hour.
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On the chalkboard, he scribbled illegibly, letters
as if an alphabet from another world.
Was he, as he stood
with his back to twenty pairs of eyes,
a vessel into which a spirit poured?
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3.
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I bumped into him yesterday at the gym.
Dumbbells his devotion now. He didn’t remember me
or the poem I interpreted—brilliantly, he wrote
on my paper. We exchanged a few words, nothing
special, nothing to illuminate our souls.
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4.
The weight of worship, that’s what it was, worship
in that classroom, the only Temple for him,
the only place where, without a thought
of God, he dwelled with God, one line, one word,
one syllable, one consonant, one vowel—
one breath at a time.
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Richard Chess
from The Loneliest Monk, Orison Books, Asheville NC; © 2026
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❀ ❀ ❀
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From Generation to Generation
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Where did it go, the faith
of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob,
after it entered his father’s life?
The highway from Philly to High Point,
a traveling salesman’s road.
The commission provided
for his mother and him, the adopted son.
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For his bar mitzvah, the boy
who would become a yearning man, received
a Smith Corona Super Sterling typewriter.
Ever since, he’s been typing
his way to Eden’s gate.
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What could his father make of a boy
who would never sell a thing hi his life?
A boy who escaped through a window
of words, turning pages
while in another room family and friends
noshed and laughed?
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Did his father ever imagine, driving
his Oldsmobile Cutlass, AM radio crackling,
that his son would but a period
on the sentence of his territory—Pennsylvania
to North Carolina—by settling
at the farthest point from home on his map?
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The boy’s inheritance:
a sunburst mirror, diamond plaques—
a set of four, one for each season.
Plastic wall décor, samples
his father left behind, stored in the garage.
Meanwhile, the boy, now grown,
clacks another line.
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If there were scissors in heaven,
his father would send a clipping
of a news story about a good life to his son:
a putting green, a winning
local team, a stock market beyond
heart-stopping wild swings.
But he does not want his son
to join him, not tomorrow, not today.
Let him make as much of heaven
as he can there, in the monkish solitude
of his mountain room, his father prays,
though he never was one for prayer.
Let’s call it a wish.
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Richard Chess
from The Loneliest Monk, Orison Books, Asheville NC; © 2026
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❀ ❀ ❀ ❀ ❀
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Richard Chess writes that he is not the lonely monk. Not lonely with so many students and teachers spanning the decades, not lonely because of his many friends. Perhaps most of all not lonely because words visit him, gather about, perch on his shoulder to whisper, sometimes shriek. And yet there is a space where words dissolve, where etymologies and taxonomies lose their substance in the mist and swirl, which space one calls nothing and another calls everything. In that place, aren’t we all sentenced to loneliness?
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Quantum physicist Richard P. Feynman has written, “Which end is nearer to God; if I may use a religious metaphor. Beauty and hope, or the fundamental laws? . . . And I do not think either end is nearer to God. To stand at either end, and to walk off that end of the pier only, hoping that out in that direction is the complete understanding, is a mistake.” The monk is never lonely because it is always him and God. The monk is always lonely because it is only him and God. And the monk is loneliest, perhaps, because this long journey is a solitary one, the journey of gathering up those words again and herding them back into some order that at least aspires to perfection. That waves away the obvious impossibility of the task and nevertheless orders the words to convey.
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We readers, we companions on that journey, we are also lonely monks. We walk into that space of words (or run, or jump) and hope. Will it be just the poet and us? Or will it be us, the poet, and God?
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Richard Chess is Professor Emeritus at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, where for more than three decades he taught courses in English, Creative Writing, and Jewish Studies. Among his other wide ranging service, he has been active in The Association for the Contemplative Mind In Higher Education. The Loneliest Monk is Richard’s fifth book of poetry.
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Orison Books focuses on writing that expresses the life of the spirit from a broad and inclusive range of perspectives. The Loneliest Monk is available HERE
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Other poems by Richard Chess at Verse and Image:
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[The quotation by Richard P. Feynman is from a talk he gave at Cornell University in 1964, broadcast by the BBC and published in Feynman’s book, The Character of the Physical Law; excerpted in The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, edited by Timothy Ferris; Little, Brown, and Company © 1991 by Timothy Ferris.]
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