When the dean says she understands completely
she means there isn’t enough money, and anyway,
she disagrees. Go back to your computer, sort the emails
of your students, arrange for their tour of the rooms of books
they will never have time to read. No one
can see anymore, through the winter steam of the city,
overpowering moon and stars, the desperate aurora.
And in “Interrupted Meditation” when Hass is told
that “there is no key, not even the sum total
of our acts,” he thinks of love, sees the end
of his marriage, his wife in tears. “I don’t love you,
she said. The terrible thing is / that I don’t think I ever
loved you.” What I thought, reading the poem,
was how I watched a room of faculty, for half an hour,
expostulate the filing of a form. Tonight I’ll stand
before my students, buttoned into my pantsuit,
fulfilling a contract in exchange
for health insurance. He was right, Hass, your Pole,
and then you found not even love
could answer him.
So you sang out the name of a weed,
the common name of a weed against
the whole world because you couldn’t say
there isn’t any key. Plastic
tray of the registrar’s unprocessed forms,
black and finely dusted. Manicured nail
my reading student draws across the line,
wrapping word after word in glossy beige.
Spruce. Aurora. Pearly everlasting.
Anything not to say we make it so.