Thesis

I retired from teaching about eighteen months ago, but received in the mail today a poetry thesis to read and sign. Oh yeah, that other life wherein I spent about thirty-five years.

The thesis is dedicated to a poet friend of mine, dead of liver cancer six weeks ago. There won't ever be a building named for him—I hear him sigh with relief from so far away—but a collection of poems dedicated to him by a student who respected him, yes, this would have made him glad.

For about ten minutes. He was a man who usually closed the experience-fired lid over his heart, and light couldn't get in, light for and from the small things: the memos and meetings, the monthly paycheck, morning coffee, getting the hell out of the office when another semester was over, and another.

I don't want to read this thesis, or any other, ever, is the way I feel right now. It's probably pretty good as far as theses go.

I also don't want to read . . . let's see . . . the natural history of the green sea turtle. I'm tired, and turtles in all the world's oceans are suffering from what some biologists believe to be the most serious epidemic among nonhumans, fibropillomatosis. According to Osha Gray Davidson in Fire in the Turtle House, this disease, which is evident by a "conglomeration of warty nodules" on fins and face that limit the turtle's vision and mobility unto death, is found in every ocean, and in just two decades has come to threaten six of the seven marine turtle species on earth. Davidson got up close to this disease, saw one turtle move "through the water slowly and heavily like death itself, dragging its tumors along. It is a terrifying sight." Human beings, increasing numbers of us dragging tumors to oncologists, are implicated, of course, in the dis-ease of the oceans. Studies are ongoing, but as a Hawaiian holy man told Davidson, "Studies are like the tide. . . . It flows in and out. But nothing is done." His metaphor is more than awkward, but we know what he means, as we know what these studies mean even before any so-called studying is done.

I'm tired. It's about one hundred days after the World Trade Center's twin towers thundered to the ground, those unnatural shells (I say faithfully) or manifestations of human nature, and poetry subsides under the rubble in me, but will swim upward out of that historical smoke, heavily and half-blind, filled with tumors, my totem again, my thesis nailed to the door of a failed church in what may once have come to be Eden.