Transcendentalism

The professor stabbed his chest with his hands curled like forks

before coughing up the question

that had dogged him since he first read Emerson:

Why am I “I”? Like musk oxen we hunkered

while his lecture drifted against us like snow.

If we could, we would have turned our backs into the wind.

I felt bad about his class’s being such a snoozefest, though peaceful too,

a quiet little interlude from everyone outside

rooting up the corpse of literature

for being too Caucasian. There was a simple answer

to my own question (how come no one loved me,

stomping on the pedals of my little bicycle):

I was insufferable. So, too, was Emerson I bet,

though I liked If the red slayer think he slays—

the professor drew a giant eyeball to depict the Over-soul.

Then he read a chapter from his own book:

naptime.

He didn’t care if our heads tipped forward on their stalks.

When spring came, he even threw us a picnic in his yard

where dogwood bloomed despite a few last

dirty bergs of snow. He was a wounded animal

being chased across the tundra by those wolves,

the postmodernists. At any moment

you expected to see blood come dripping through his clothes.

And I am I who never understood his question,

though he let me climb to take a seat

aboard the wooden scow he’d been building in the shade

of thirty-odd years. How I ever rowed it

from his yard, into my life—remains a mystery.

The work is hard because the eyeball’s heavy, riding in the bow.

Source: Inseminating the Elephant (Copper Canyon Press, 2009)