Sunday poetry: "Professor"

My poetry blog comes full circle today with “Professor,” the last Sunday poem that I will post – for the time being, anyway – in the Journal of Radical Wonder. The weekly feature began last April with “Openings,” a poem about a toddler learning to say the word “window” in the crib, and it ends now with a piece about a woman who is past the point of learning new words. No doubt she could if she wanted to, but she is now over eighty and nearing the end of a life spent enlightening others, and her craving for new knowledge is slight. If she is to learn something world-changing, it may require a change to the next world. I am not sure if old age is really like that, but I can guess.
 
Sometimes, as authors, we create characters as cautionary examples. Sometimes, we create them for entertainment or adventure. Other times, we simply craft them as examples of qualities that we like -- an easy enough feat in poetry, which doesn’t require us to test their personalities with a conflict-laden storyline. The title character of “Professor” is one of my personal favorites, and I have no interest in constructing a 300-page novel around her. She is content to stay on the beach. This poem originally appeared in The First Thing Mastered, a chronological collection about the first few decades of life, but it doesn’t appear in a section about old age; the book doesn’t have one. Instead, it’s grouped with the poems about college life and young adulthood. In the context of the book, the protagonist of the poem is not the professor herself, but the undergraduates who seek her attention. It doesn’t matter that they contribute little to the poem themselves. Our life story is a shared one, defined sometimes by our encounters with others, and sometimes we inch out of the spotlight to let older and wiser ones borrow it.
 
If you are a person of a certain age reading this blog, you must have had mentors who inspired you growing up: professors, high school teachers, coaches, maybe even bosses. I had many such people, and as I write this sentence, I hope that at least a few of them will read it. The greatest tribute that I can give them is to show that I absorbed their wisdom. In the case of “Professor,” the title character’s wisdom is simplicity. She is not Charles Foster Kane, dying in a shadowy mansion with “No Trespassing” signs looming on the gates. As death (or at least emeritus status) approaches, she steadily parts with clutter. During her office hours, she no longer meets in an office at all, but lets students seek her out on a bench overlooking the ocean. She is up front about her buck teeth and the scar on her gum; physical beauty no longer matters. A widow, she has stopped driving and recently donated her late husband’s belongings to the Good Will. Even as a professor, she no longer feels the need to prove her astuteness. When students ask her questions, she responds with questions. Like Socrates’ pupils, they can teach themselves the answers.
 
Twice in the poem (quoted in italics, which are less definite), the professor states, I am giving myself back. She wants to leave a small footprint, as we say in modern times. Does that make her selfless? Not at all -- we cannot be selfless by nature. There is an art, though, to projecting a self that is not crass or obnoxious. The professor has worked assiduously at a graceful exit. Perhaps her last incarnation benefits the environment; she seems to use few resources, even as she notes the climate change that has brought up sea levels around her. Perhaps her example inspires students. She certainly will not provide as much work for movers as some of us do upon death. Her one act of true initiative in the poem, in the spirit of Mary Poppins, is to feed the birds. They are excited to see her, and she returns their enthusiasm. Her fingers shake as she opens the Ziploc bag and tosses the crumbs. She wonders if she will get an eternal reward for feeding them. Some of us never stop puzzling about karma.
 
And that is where the poem ends, and also where my year in the Journal of Radical Wonder ends. Years ago, I was grateful for the mentors who helped to give me a voice. Right now, I am grateful for the Radical Wonder staff who have given that voice a platform. Like the professor in my poem, they encourage others to speak for themselves. They believe in the power of wonder. They certainly are not in it for the money. As I write this, the most recent submissions on the website are Tiffany Elliott’s prose poem “Sisterhood,” Margaret Sefton’s short story “Breakthrough Queen.” Read them both. Savor what they have to tell you. Think of them like the crumbs scattered to those birds -- small but fulfilling, a promise of being fed again, an assertion in the face of those rising tides.