Anne Whitehouse
The Old Professor
I
Forty-five years ago, I showed up
at his office at the scheduled hour
for a makeup map quiz. The shapes
of the mountains and rivers and lakes
of Latin America lay like neural synapses
and pathways across the inner landscape
of my brain as, keyed up and nervous,
I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again.
At last he answered it, visibly startled,
while strains of Bach wafted around him.
He had forgotten our appointment,
and I had interrupted him.
Embarrassed, I apologized,
but no matter: he selected a test
from a stack and disappeared,
leaving me to take it on my own.
I remember the strangeness I felt
at my glimpse into his private life.
I had never thought about what
my teachers did when they were alone.
As I took his test, I wondered,
did I wake him from a nap? His hair
was mussed as if he had been sleeping,
though I might just as well have
summoned him from reading.
Now a professor emeritus,
with the leisure to revisit
his research of fifty years ago,
he finds threads still untied
and uncharted paths to follow.
He has written a new paper
about his old book. It bristles
with footnotes, raising questions
and suggestions. “It’s work
I hope I won’t live to complete,
or I’d be a hundred and ten.
This legacy I leave to someone else.”
His voice barely a whisper,
lost in his own minutiae, deploring:
“I have outlived my hearing,
like so much else.”
II
I think of those country people,
fierce and unsmiling,
equipped with rifle and sword,
their chests crisscrossed by bandeliers,
victors and victims in the armed struggles
whose causes he analyzed,
whose legacies he clarified.
Human violence is the constant,
history is told by the winners
or by the losers who keep
memories of their losses alive.
It is the historian’s work
to separate myth from reality,
to make meaning from the jumbled past,
to reveal our forebears as they were,
not as we would have them be.
Whitehouse’s poetry collections include Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, and, most recently, Outside from the Inside(Dos Madres Press, 2020). Surrealist Muse, her poem about Leonora Carrington, was published by Ethelzine. She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love.
I
Forty-five years ago, I showed up
at his office at the scheduled hour
for a makeup map quiz. The shapes
of the mountains and rivers and lakes
of Latin America lay like neural synapses
and pathways across the inner landscape
of my brain as, keyed up and nervous,
I knocked on the door, waited, knocked again.
At last he answered it, visibly startled,
while strains of Bach wafted around him.
He had forgotten our appointment,
and I had interrupted him.
Embarrassed, I apologized,
but no matter: he selected a test
from a stack and disappeared,
leaving me to take it on my own.
I remember the strangeness I felt
at my glimpse into his private life.
I had never thought about what
my teachers did when they were alone.
As I took his test, I wondered,
did I wake him from a nap? His hair
was mussed as if he had been sleeping,
though I might just as well have
summoned him from reading.
Now a professor emeritus,
with the leisure to revisit
his research of fifty years ago,
he finds threads still untied
and uncharted paths to follow.
He has written a new paper
about his old book. It bristles
with footnotes, raising questions
and suggestions. “It’s work
I hope I won’t live to complete,
or I’d be a hundred and ten.
This legacy I leave to someone else.”
His voice barely a whisper,
lost in his own minutiae, deploring:
“I have outlived my hearing,
like so much else.”
II
I think of those country people,
fierce and unsmiling,
equipped with rifle and sword,
their chests crisscrossed by bandeliers,
victors and victims in the armed struggles
whose causes he analyzed,
whose legacies he clarified.
Human violence is the constant,
history is told by the winners
or by the losers who keep
memories of their losses alive.
It is the historian’s work
to separate myth from reality,
to make meaning from the jumbled past,
to reveal our forebears as they were,
not as we would have them be.
Whitehouse’s poetry collections include Blessings and Curses, The Refrain, Meteor Shower, and, most recently, Outside from the Inside(Dos Madres Press, 2020). Surrealist Muse, her poem about Leonora Carrington, was published by Ethelzine. She is also the author of a novel, Fall Love.