The Old Professor’s Book by Ishion Hutchinson

The Old Professor’s Book

Evening blooms in heat a braying of bells 

from August Town; my mind fizzles 

over “A Grammarian’s Funeral,” its sporadic arc 

welding and breaking the question, how to 

align poetry with truth. A stalled elevation, 

returning in my old professor’s blight 

marginalia, his book, offered abruptly, 

taken, stowed away, now posthumously examined: 

fragile pencil webbings of flickered exclamations, 

impatient the way he paced the blackboard, 

erased a word (“meteors”), hurled glances 

somewhere far off, beyond me, himself

a boy-comet, weeping to his duty. 

Once I strayed to the tubular steel chair 

chained in a corner, glistening sweat 

on one leg, our eyes wounded appraisal 

met there and he cracked the air, charged 

me pick up Browning’s chorus. I couldn’t. 

He died. His pupil flowered later into 

the voltage of self-alienating poetry, 

away from that moribund grammarian’s 

blind reluctance. Still, as moving iron 

will fuse and repel, by his book, I am 

the unspared prodigal of his abuse.