No Forgiveness Ode

Yesterday was my last day of class at the commuter college. Tomorrow they write an exam over the material covered in the second half of the course, and by next Tuesday they turn in a revision of one of their papers as a final exam. I have taught them everything I'm going to have a chance to teach them. The fall, which seemed so full of promise in September, is over. And I'm ready; I've made my mistakes, the students have made theirs, and what happens in the next week is that we all try to come to terms with it.

It's a little bit like having to drop your maternity coverage before you're entirely ready to give up the dream of another baby. Or watching the father of your children, having walked out of the marriage a few years before, move to a distant city where you'll no longer have the chance to see him every day. It's been over, but it's just now hitting you.

I love this poem, the "No Forgiveness Ode" by Dean Young, especially for its last two lines:

The husband wants to be taken back
into the family after behaving terribly,
but nothing can be taken back,
not the leaves by the trees, the rain
by the clouds. You want to take back
the ugly thing you said, but some shrapnel
remains in the wound, some mud.
Night after night Tybalt's stabbed
so the lovers are ground in mechanical
aftermath. Think of the gunk that never
comes off the roasting pan, the goofs
of a diamond cutter. But wasn't it
electricity's blunder into inert clay
that started this whole mess, the I-
echo in the head, a marriage begun
with a fender bender, a sneeze,
a mutation, a raid, an irrevocable
fuckup. So in the meantime: epoxy,
the dog barking at who knows what,
signals mixed up like a dumped-out tray
of printer's type. Some piece of you
stays in me and I'll never give it back.
The heart hoards its thorns
just as the rose profligates.
Just because you've had enough
doesn't mean you wanted too much.

I've had enough of this fall, both in terms of what I've done and what I've left undone (to quote part of an Episcopalian confession of sin).

Next we'll want too much from the holidays; it's almost time for me to start gunking up my Thanksgiving roasting pan with this year's expectations and regrets--how about you?