by Terry Trowbridge

Say, I had a great idea and now it’s gone off and become useless

-A line from the poem “The Last Romantic” by John Ashbery.

 

The scholar of Middlemarch

hacks away at his papers

over and over in his old hands

while his young wife

sits at a window and stares

at the horizons he wants to see.

The progress he calls out for on the page

turns over in the fields, and over,

and is buried again under the tilled soil

left fallow for a year.

Before his next chapter is started, 

another crop grows in the wet April ink.

Another scythe makes hay

and his wife watches the flexing shoulders

that bend the blade through one cycle and then the next.

The scholar’s next chapter finished,

his wife has left for her mother’s bedside

while he celebrates alone.

His next set of books arrive

and she does not bother to learn their titles,

knowing he will talk about them for weeks

even though he will not finish reading them until the next harvest.

His dissertation mulls in delay

while she finds beauty in the sunset 

that casts his shadow on the kitchen wall.

His dissertation is edited, and adapted to the new literature,

to the new essays. Soon he writes commentary instead of theses.

Soon his dissertation becomes a history of his peers.

His peers become thankful for his criticism,

while his wife recites his methodology to him 

at the start of every conversation.

He has forgotten the room numbers of the committee of readers

at the college

but his nieces and nephews call him Professor, lovingly.

His wife does not call on him anymore.

His wine tastes of vinegar

and the ashes of papers used to start the late December fire.