The rock critic Paul Williams once wrote that, when you come down to it, Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" is a song about exhilaration. The narrator has decided that he has nothing to live for, left his home in Georgia, roamed across the country in search of a place where he can do nothing, and now...well, in a way, he's free from all concerns. "What We're Sure Of," my poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, is a paradox in a similar way. Everything in the poem deals with some kind of anxiety: the death of grandparents, confusion about the afterlife, the threat of nuclear war, the irreversible march of time, homelessness, hunger, rain. And yet, I didn't feel anxious when I wrote it, and even when I read it now, seven years later, it has a certain lightness on its feet. At heart, it's a poem about not knowing everything. Perhaps a poem about actually knowing everything would be more ponderous fare.

I'm a teacher. Before that, I was a journalist. Before that, I was a student. I know lots of things, and I pass a lot of them on to people who might someday pass them on as well. My entire life, the only thing that I have ever received any money for is telling people things. I don't wield a hammer or a saw, perform surgeries, or build houses. Certainly, I wouldn't make it as an athlete. I live and work each day under the assumption that information is valuable -- Malala Yousafzai risked her life for an education, after all. After 44 years, I know the names of every U.S. president in order (and that Grover Cleveland served two nonconsecutive terms, and is thus counted twice). I know that Australia is both a country and a continent, that a banana is technically a berry, that Episode IV of Star Wars was actually the first one made, and that Andy Warhol didn't really say that everyone will be famous for 15 minutes. I know how to drive a car (though I am rusty when it comes to changing a tire) and how to fill out an income tax form. The word dachshund is actually German for "badger dog," not "wiener dog." Periods and commas should come before quotation marks. If you heat a hardboiled egg in the microwave, it's best to drizzle a little water on it so that it doesn't get rubbery.

The above list may sound like a jumble of random facts. Of course it is. I could fill an infinite series of volumes about the things I don't know, but what I store in my gray matter has kept me alive so far. Obviously, it helped me to graduate from school and get a series of jobs. It would not help me against a tidal wave or hungry bear, but I take precautions to stay away from those. In the confines of my world, I feel like I have the right toolbox to get by. I hope the same thing for my students; every so often, I remind them that the main point of English class is not to pass every vocabulary test or place every semicolon perfectly, but to realize the extraordinariness of life and to develop a certain sense of empathy and perspective. In the 7th grade right now, we're reading Avi's brilliant 1991 novel Nothing but the Truth, in which a high school student does a cruel thing to his teacher that is passed onto a news reporter and then distorted in the media, to the point where the public is in uproar over an incident that never happened and the teacher's career is seemingly ruined. Yes, there will be tests on the reading, and I hope the students pass them. But more than that, I hope that they will learn to be skeptical about gossip, to understand the concept of biased news, to remember that there are two sides to many stories. Perhaps one day, like the title character of Slumdog Millionaire, they will appear on a game show in which Nothing but the Truth is the answer to the final question. However big, however small, something good must come of the fact that we read the novel in class. That's the faith that keeps us teaching.

I know, without requiring evidence, that I will never have a student who remembers everything that I told him or her. They will probably all remember some of it, and some of them will pass parts of it on. The information that they learned from me will compete for space in their own gray matter with information that they learned from countless others. That is as it should be. All that matters is that their knowledge will help them, whatever form "help" entails. Perhaps it will give them a ticket to Harvard, or the strategic skills to avoid the next pandemic, or simply an amusing set of trivia to mull over when they have trouble falling asleep. "What We're Sure Of," which appeared in the book Angels in Seven, is a rambling three-section poem that started after I had coffee with a fellow poet who told me that his grandfather (or father -- I may have tweaked the word) had died. The poet was marveling at his (grand)father's intellect and the possibility that it might simply have ceased to exist. "Everything he knew is gone," the poet said, and I incorporated that phrase into section one. Section two is about my office space, the bookshelves filled with memorized passages and the CDs that I played incessantly as a teenager, both for the music and the history behind them. The homeless woman who appears at the end of the section serves as a reminder of the limits of book knowledge -- "our luck determines what we learn from rain." We're lucky if our survival depends on Shakespeare rather than how to scrounge for water.

As I said above, it's not entirely a melancholy poem. Section three is where it turns brighter. That part is based on a real experience that I had years ago tutoring a Chinese girl; Cindy was her name, or at least the anglicized one that she picked as an exchange student. She was bright, inquisitive, and doing her best to comprehend Mark Twain's dialect in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, not the easiest book for an English-learner. She was determined, though, and one day, we stopped on a word in the text that reminded her of another. As the poem states:

                                                                                                   She pauses
           at sever, the cousin of severe, and I sketch a flailing hand cleaved
           from the arm where it once belonged. If you sever a hand, I say,
         you have a severe injury. She smiles, tugs a sleeve over her fingers.
         Severe, like serious?

All of that actually happened. I only tutored Cindy for another couple of weeks, so I can only speculate what she did with the knowledge I gave her. Hopefully, she ended up passing all the assessments about Huckleberry Finn. Presumably, she went back to China with plenty of stories about Americans. Perhaps she even encountered a situation where the word "sever" or "severe" came in handy. Or she may just remember them now as amusingly similar words, another quirk of the English language. Maybe that's why Otis Redding's vision is appealing to some of us. On the dock of the bay, watching the tide, we have nothing but time to think.

If I were in a coffee shop on a listless morning with the sky turning damp outside, I would probably want to hear Norah Jones' voice more than any other. Adele would be too dramatic, Fiona Apple too deadpan, Taylor Swift too mercurial. Put on "Nightingale" or "Painter Song," though, and then picture the counter dwellers in jogging suits, the steam, the rugged chairs and folded-over newspapers of a place that prides itself on imperfection. There's no voice that scores the scene better, especially at a volume just loud enough to hear. It's the voice of soft rain and lived-in shoes. Of course, in my mind, it should play in the background at Alta Coffee, the earthy neighborhood spot in Newport Beach where I attended my first poetry open mic, met the two people who helped me to co-found Moon Tide Press, even met my wife for the first time. In my very personal experience, good things happen at Alta. I'm not sure if I ever actually heard Norah Jones here, but my memory is happy to make concessions.

My poem this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder, "Coffee Shop," is about the denizens of the location mentioned in the title, but it starts and ends as an ode to Norah Jones. Really, it's an ode to her recorded voice, which plays on a portable radio while the characters go about their business. A girl with a stutter helps to wipe down the tables, even though she doesn't work there, at least for pay. A man at the counter rants about baseball. A group of people stop by from a local shelter, and the owner mutters Another lost morning to himself. A construction foreman enters feeling generous, orders coffee for everyone, and beckons the stuttering girl to dance. The poem ends with absolutely nothing being resolved, but everyone is pleased momentarily: They're alive, Norah Jones is singing, and the coffee must be at least decent. 

This isn't a terribly profound poem, unless it's profound by accident. It was a fun one to write, though (I used a semi-pantoum style that I haven't used before or since, with line endings recurring in the next stanza), and sometimes it's enough simply to capture everyday life without a grand statement attached. Evidently, the subject of hard-luck characters gathering for a smile and a drink has a lot of appeal to artists; I think of Billy Joel's song "Piano Man" ("It's nine o'clock on a Saturday / regular crowd shuffles in"), the sitcom Cheers ("Where everybody knows your name") -- maybe even Edward Hopper's painting Nighthawks, although we can only speculate whether his subjects hang out at the bar on a regular basis. I have been to many restaurants over the years and ordered many cups of coffee, but I have never been a "regular," with an affable group of friends always waiting at the bar to share a story and pontificate about life. I have my wife and daughter, not to mention fellow teachers, to play that role. I'm sure I could make arrangements at the local Starbucks if needed.

Actually, I would more likely pick Alta -- or the Ugly Mug, another marvelously rustic coffeehouse in Orange that became the indirect subject of a poetry anthology in 2011. That year, Ben Trigg and Steve Ramirez celebrated their tenth anniversary of running the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry weekly reading series, and Tebot Bach published an anthology that featured "Coffee Shop" and a slew of other works by poets who commonly appeared there on Wednesday nights. OK, so I have been a regular somewhere, kind of. The anthology's title, Don't Blame the Ugly Mug, came from the words that Trigg said every night in his introduction to the crowd: "Don't blame the Ugly Mug. We're the idiots running the reading." Well, I never heard anyone blame anybody. It was a warm, spontaneous, and nurturing atmosphere (Trigg, who did emcee duty while Ramirez operated the sound system, called for a special round of applause for any first-time open reader), and I'm pleased to say that it's not a thing of the past; the series recently celebrated 22 years, which is literally twice as long as the run of Cheers.

The appeal of that kind of show (or song, or painting, or whatever) is that it features a group of characters from different walks of life who might never meet if not for this particular venue. That's the poetry world in a nutshell. None of us made a living off of the tip jar or the few books that we sold; we came in after a long day of being nurses, accountants, stay-at-home parents, landscapers, financial consultants, or whatever else paid the mortgage. We bonded over our love of a craft, and the camaraderie took care of itself. Sitting at this keyboard right now, I can rattle off a list of names and faces: Ricki, Lee, Jaimes, Eric, Kate, Brendan, Murray, Mindy, probably two or three people named John. Thursday morning would come with demands, but we made a beautiful Wednesday night. I'm sure Norah Jones played in the background at least once.

It may say a lot about me -- or about our culture -- that I never developed a fear of flying after 9/11. On that day in 2001, I was shocked and bewildered, like so many others. I watched the image time and again of the planes sailing into the twin towers. Even after that, I never felt anxious about boarding a plane -- not even on Sept. 12, 2002, when I boarded an 11-hour flight to begin graduate school in England. Some people winced when I told them that date of departure; I guess 9/12 was close enough to 9/11. But I had the same assurance as I always had: My seatbelt would fasten, the flight attendants would go over the guidelines for what to do in case of an emergency, and then an emergency probably wouldn't happen. I knew, of course, that the TSA agents would thoroughly examine everyone's pockets for box cutters. I spent those 11 hours on the plane reading, watching in-flight movies, and otherwise distracting myself from a journey that the average human would have found thrilling and terrifying a century ago. The flight landed in London on schedule.

It was not that trip but another (another of many; I honestly can't remember where I was headed) that inspired "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX," my poem featured this week in the Journal of Radical Wonder. If the particulars of that flight have slipped my memory, then that perhaps proves the point. We spend much of our lives traveling at superhuman speed, and we do it to the extent that it no longer feels superhuman. Perhaps it's a form of reverse survival; the amygdala protects our body by sending panic signals to the brain, and indifference protects our sanity by desensitizing us to panic. The next time you're on a plane, think about the circumstances: You're barreling at a phenomenal speed at an impossible height, on a vessel equipped with enough fuel to cause a massive explosion if it ran into anything. Any person alive before Kitty Hawk would call you the greatest daredevil in history. But on board, the windows block out the sound of air pounding outside, the clouds drift agreeably by, and the ticket that you booked online states that you will land in a certain city at a precise hour and minute. If this moment really stood a chance of ending your life, then the stewardess wouldn't be smiling and offering you ginger ale.

Perhaps you traveled by air not long before reading this. Perhaps you drove a car -- something that is statistically far more dangerous than taking a plane. What compelled you was most likely not recklessness but trust. We trust machines, and pilots, and drivers, and above all statistics. In the movie Rain Man, Dustin Hoffman's autistic character rattles off the history of crashes by airlines that he refuses to take. Audiences typically laugh at that scene; we're more inclined to think of the millions of flights that land without incident. "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX" is the final poem of Angels in Seven, a book about the onset of middle age, and its companion piece is the collection's opener, "The Chicago Window Washer Lets His Soap Paintings Stay," about a man who dangles on a cable over the sides of skyscrapers to clean windows for the well-to-do. Both poems are about being suspended in air. Both poems feature characters who face the possibility of death but more or less accept it. When I wrote both poems, as a spring chicken of 36, I imagined that that was what middle age felt like. Eight years later, I can't correct myself much.

Everything in "Alaska Airlines Nonstop to LAX" is nonfiction. I wrote it to pass the time while waiting for the plane to land, and all the details -- American Hustle on the in-flight movie, the mountains reflecting light outside -- were what I saw around me. The opening lines of the poem reference 9/11, but more out of bemusement than fear. When those planes took off on that horrific day, how mundane did they seem? What crossword puzzles were being worked on, what magazines leafed through? It's doubtful that anyone on board was thinking about the awesome power of the plane itself, other than, sadly, the hijackers. To murder is to take away the gift of life. To give the gift of life is to allow the privilege of being bored by it. Any time we touch a tarmac safely, we are more likely to begin scrolling through texts than we are to fall down and kiss the ground. We have been spared a devastating fate in the sky, and so we begin looking for distractions on land.

That doesn't mean we're fearless. It just means that we have odd criteria for safety. Earlier this year, my family and I went to Honolulu on vacation, and we were given a hotel room many floors up with a remarkable view of the ocean. It also had a remarkable view of the street hundreds of feet below, and after nodding once at the beauty of the horizon, I gingerly moved away from the guardrail. What if it had a screw loose, some small defect that would give way if I leaned against it? I have no fear of flying, but I will admit to being skittish with heights, and if I could articulate the reason for those two facts, then I might hit on some grand truth about how we navigate life. Perhaps if I had made countless trips onto that balcony, thrusting my head forward to catch the breeze, then I would have learned to feel invincible. Perhaps I just needed a stewardess nearby, reciting the instructions for a parachute that I probably wouldn't have to open.