In a season of deaths,
when the dead ones, the great ones
were falling all around,
when the leaves were turning
scarlet, crimson, brown as blood,
when the birches trembled
& the oaks turned gold,
I dreamed,
perhaps for the last time,
the old exam-dream:
a history course
& I had not read a word.
Though I took my degree Phi Bete
with every honor,
I trembled in my dream
that I would fail.
Oh the terror
in the college corridor!
The fear of reprisals,
the fear of death.
The history of the world
is blank to me.
The only thing I know
is certain
death.
How are we tested?
Why do our minds
go blank?
Why the exam room,
courtroom,
why the witness stand?
Even the Phi Bete kids
must fail in dreams;
A’s & F’s are equalized
by sleep.
Perhaps we are tested by mortality.
No childhood of anxiety
& pain,
no eyes behind glasses
searching flyspeck print
can spare us
from the certain truth
we fail.
Teach us to live
each day
as if our last.
Teach us the present tense,
teach us the word.
Teach us to take air in
& let it out
without the fearful catch
of breath on death.
Truce with the cosmos,
soul at peace within,
we may stop dreaming
that we fail
life’s school.
Our lives are in your hands,
our deaths assured.
Between this knowledge
& our schooldays
fall our dreams.