the other day, while on campus, i ran into a professor, "B". its always strange seeing professors as an alum. theyre the same, in the same place doing the same job, the cycle of students continues. it reminds me how little impact I probably had on a place that had such a massive impact on me. Anyway, we used to have coffee regularly, he was, at a time, very encouraging of me and my work. He was also very open about his life, something i'd never experienced with a teacher. I never got through a cup of coffee without hearing at least one detail about his relationship with his wife, "C", a woman i'd never met. She was actually the head of the creative writing department but by late junior year id never had a class with her and i probably never would have IF NOT for her husband who had her come to the first reading of my first play. At the end she walked up to me and said: "we dont know eachother but ive read your poetry and now im convinced you need to write a play as a senior thesis." It didnt say much for my poetry but it was the begining of her role in my life as thesis advisor and painfully honest life coach...not to mention the beginning of the strangest student-professor triangle i have ever been unlucky enough to be involved in.
Almost as soon as I met C, she and B filled for divorce. It was like my parents all over again on a strange academic level. B started telling me more than i wanted to know during our coffee dates. C broke down in our thesis meetings. I knew the drill. Soon id have to pick sides. So i did. There was something familiar in her pain and while i never got much of a story from her end (she was much more professional) I had a feeling who had stepped out of line, or out of love, and I didn't think it was C.
When i saw B this last time I was on my way to meet C. Which, for some reason, I mentioned to him, immediately regretting it. We hugged awkwardly, stood awkwardly and awkwardly did not discuss the fact that I was on campus and had not let him know, even though i'm sure i'd said i would when we had our graduation goodbyes. But the awk factor ratcheted up to a new level when he casually slipped into our conversation the completely off topic fact that he had a girlfriend. And this less than six months since the divorce was finalized. I recognized the maneuver. He wanted it to get back to C. Fantastic, I thought, remembering how fun it had been scrambling to hide my knowledge of dads live-in girlfriend from my mom for over a year. While I waited for C in the hall outside her office, listening to her raspy familiar voice probing some poor student likely terrified having come to office hours hoping simply for brownie points for showing up, I leafed through an old and distinguished literary journal left on a table. Suddenly I found myself on a piece by C herself. Sitting there I thought about the record a published poet leaves. This beautiful tenderly woven love poem sat in the English department, not to mention the internet, for everyone to see, emotionally out of date, but uncorrected, like todays newspaper with yesterdays headlines. Like an old diary entry the mean kids found, copied and posted all over school.
When the student finally tore past me leaving her office free I crept in and surprised her with a big hug. We settled into her soft chairs, legs tucked up under us, I asked about her life, her work. "oh, I'm doing fine. better. hanging on to the window sill with a little more than my fingernails these days." Well, i said, thats a start. "yeah, and for the first time in three years Ive been sending out poems." We smiled at each other then, and i caught something as it flashed through her eyes that I only recognized later to be the smolder of revenge.
silly me, to pity the poet, crafter of words, writer of history, ruiner of worlds.
The Story
by C
found in Ploughshares, Winter 1993
Innocent and earnest, good at marathons, the surgeon
believed in his hands; he said
he’d cut the tumor out, a convoluted unnatural thing
wrapping its tentacles around the brain’s little house.
Nothing more than architecture, then he paused:
he knew about the maze, the puzzle.
He put on his white clothes; over his entire being
he laid white cloth, he gathered his men
and the one woman, and they all went in
with sharp instruments. The drill took the bone
and the red spray flew. They found the right room
in the back of the head. They found the tiny monster heart
wavering near the brain stem.
But no microscope could turn down the folds
of the pineal gland, where the soul looked out
its infinite window and saw the altered light.
Saw the giant hand that was not God’s.
No scalding oil fell, the soul did not shiver
and hide its face. The light of science
went on burning, and so did the knife,
dismantling cell by cell. But the soul was calm.
It waited out the industrious nine-hour sleep,
dozing itself at times to avoid the blinding
overhead lamp. The soul sang its little songs,
dreamless infant songs: far beneath and years gone,
complimentary to the Mozart the surgeon played.
Humming away, the soul wove a tuneless cover
for every memory of intrusion, fear, and pain.
And when you woke—
cut even where the clamps had held the mask to your face,
bandaged and swollen and clean,
changed but for the wide pacific blue of your eyes—
love still lay there: handsome, without innocence,
and utterly faithful.
