Summer 2026
I’m happy I’m retiring after forty years,
so why am I thinking of two women
dead too soon decades ago, students
I liked who seemed to like my teaching?
They didn’t know each other. The only
connection is in how I imagine them now,
still alive and young, standing side
by side in a home movie, staring at me.
What more do they want me to say?
Now and then they turn away from me
and from each other, being strangers who don’t
know—maybe don’t want to know—why
I’ve brought them together, yet might ask,
warily, if only I’d call on them to speak,
that same question, why. After all, you’re
the goddamn professor. You profess
to have all the answers. Even retired,
you’ll always be a goddamn professor.
Rebekah, proto-punk of my first classes,
brilliant with blue hair one week, black
leather and mohawk the next, graduated,
married, and then died of the same cancer
she had watched eat away at her father.
For years the TV station where she worked
played announcements she had recorded,
her mellow alto alive in my living room.
Sara, red-headed cowgirl, wanted me
to tell her her stories about teenage love
in the Panhandle held promise. We talked
them over for hours, all the right choices
she had made and the many more to come,
and days later a patch of ice and a bridge
abutment killed her on her way home for
Christmas. She had already earned her A.
Those are their real names, though that doesn’t
stop me from thinking of that pair in Genesis,
both barren for years but finally delivered
of famous sons, women unworthy of record
if not for those improbable births. Believe
if you want. I believe in retiring ghosts, the kind
that glimmer with what was and what might have been,
haunting the falling down house of the mind.
Parents, siblings, lovers live on with their
singular griefs. But I bring these two together,
friends in untold sorrow and fruitless dreams.
What have I failed to do or say or see to?
Still, it’s not my place to speak for them,
tattered manuscripts, the language beyond
my ken, broken off in mid-sentence.
And I have to ask myself did they—do they—
do me any good in my long, uneventful life?
Maybe the only good I’ve done is listen.
Listen and learn, but first learn to listen,
lesson for professors as much as for students.
Outcomes matter so little. The future’s all fantasy.
Only the birthing and dying present is real,
housing the past we treasure or have to face.
Rebekah, Sara, in the brief times we shared
nothing I taught you mattered then or now.
Lucky to witness your hopes, your striving, your lives
rich with invention, I have not forgotten you.
I never will. Now, though you want for nothing,
have I come close to what you would want me to say?
I have to believe I can learn to live with that.
