First, return the library books you’d kept
for so long, you’d forgotten they weren’t yours.
Your online access is good for a few weeks more,
so download e-books with abandon
and PDFs while they’re still free.
And when you clean out your desk in the TA office,
only the pencil cup belongs to you;
the pencils inside are college property.
In the corner, the fuzzy armchair still
has that hole, which belongs to everyone
who ever read in that chair between classes, desperately
puzzling out the theoretical underpinnings
of their own contingent futures. Don’t bother
with commemoration. You won’t want
to remember, say, that conference in Ireland
where you spilled coffee down your shirt,
in front of some scholar who’d won prizes, usually never without
his coterie of students, the next generation and such,
but the next generation was scrounging
for travel grants and couldn’t come.
You both apprehended the stain spreading
over your swampy polyester blouse, ruining
the lace bra underneath. Time for a joke?
Ask for a napkin? But he moved on
to contemplate his aloneness across the hall.
There’s no such thing as a forest. There are individual
trees and there is timber. When it’s all over
and the timber is carted away, we lone
individuals roam the clear cut. Each of us forage
for work. For health insurance. For some lost, other life.
writer's note
For a long time I've tried to write about leaving academia, but hard to write about it in a way that even remotely captures the depth of grief I feel, not for myself but for the entire system of higher education in the 21st century. I don't think this does it that well, but at least it's a shot. Image courtesy of the Public Domain Archive.