Or To Begin Again

Amid some counting that I couldn't escape doing last week (counting is like listing; I avoid it when possible), I realized that I have been teaching writing to first-year college students for over a quarter of a century. By some standards, that's a career--and I'm not talking about the cushy kind where one gets sabbaticals and health benefits and conference funding. I'm thinking maybe it's about time to put away my Don Quixote pen.

I read a poem recently that reinforces that feeling; it's the title poem from Ann Lauterbach's volume Or To Begin Again. The poem has sixteen stanzas, and each one except the first and the last begins with "or to begin again." To me, it's like all these falls, meeting new groups of students who are new to college, and trying to teach them the same (new to them) concepts and practices. Here are two stanzas that speak to me the most:

7
Or to begin again
some got lucky, came rushing
toward the giant appeasement of the given.
Singing along with the anthem
they distributed coupons to the rest
to redeem, solace for those who do not
begin but stay back in the infrastructure
of the singular: what you said, what I said, before
the fact. Were we to be among those to be counted
one by one, like days? Greeted by our host?
In which language? And what were we meant to
carry away, down the road a bit, into the rest?
Light strays across the dry grasses.
The arm lifts, the head turns.
A gathering, an image, a dispersal
in whichever order. The end.

14
Or to begin again: lavish permission,
ribbons placed back in their bag,
pulled through the sleeves
of the prisoner's coat, the suicide's
gun. The Arab men
are playing backgammon in the courtyard.
The preacher's voice fills the chapel
with iconographies of faith.
Our tears turn to ice
and the mourners stop along the path,
informal now, unrestrained, makeshift.
So that with nothing held back we sigh,
beyond time, for that green pasture where time
stands still. Does not. Does. Go back
before the beginning, before
a promise was made. The end.

I keep trying to tell myself that the feeling of fall as a new beginning that I had before one of my friends unexpectedly lost his job at the end of August can be recaptured. That what I'm feeling is just a momentary lapse in my enthusiasm for doing what turned out to be...my life's work?

Are you also in the business of beginning again? Got any thoughts about persistence and the point at which it turns into foolishness?