Gamblers

There's a disproportionate pleasure, for me, in using the phrase "the local college" when I refer to the place where I work part-time (1/6 time, to be exact) as an administrator. Because it's a fairly well-known little college, terribly expensive and with fairly high standards for admission. Truthfully, the students are well-brought-up and intelligent, and the faculty and staff members are generally knowledgeable and pleasant people. But it does have something of a reputation, locally, at least, for being a place full of snobs. And they don't want me in their English department. So it's fun for me to refer to it as if it's some kind of community college.

Among the many people who have passed through the local college community, the poet Julianne Buchsbaum stood out for me as someone who didn't contribute to the snobbish reputation. Hired as a librarian, she also taught a creative writing class. She wrote the poem "Gamblers," which I was thinking of this morning, as rain beat on the roof and I got ready to commute to the second college where I work:

You doze in a castle of eggshells, Tartar,
while rain soaks the cornfields outside.
This is not about me; I have nothing to do with it.

Who are you, ruminating in the corner like that?
The bar is dark; it's time to go home.
Stop ransacking the past for what ruined you.

See, outside, how the sweet cicely holds
its tiny white umbrellas in the storm?
You thought you were safe here?

Alumroot blanches the roadside from here
to wherever you're going.
Nodules that no one but you knows are alive,

lives that are their own reason for being,
with the whiteness of what is thrown open
to the dead silence of the universe.

While someone faces the hazards of loving you,
the clouds overhead foam like boiling milk
and you turn solemn and cold and formal.

Somewhere the sea drags itself over the faces
of the drowned. Somewhere gamblers
are cutting their losses as another day slips by.

In some ways, I gambled and lost, hoping to find a professional life in this small town. But there are compensations. I savor the line "lives that are their own reason for being" along with my memories of people who have passed through the local college on their way to another place where they thought they would be safe.