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  • Teaching The Merchant of Venice
  • Daniel Anderson (bio)

They reek of alcohol and sweat, My Thursday morning students Who proclaim, It’s party week! It’s only eight a.m.     Imagine my dismay. Is it so goddamn easy to forget, An inner voice inquires, That you would have been hung-over, too,Bloodshot (if even here at all,You self-righteous jerk!), Daydreaming about intercourse, Longing for bed and leering out On those soft, golden cello notes of sun,The mustard-yellow maplesAnd the misty mid-October air? Fine. So I blunder on About the play’s sundry problems: Antonio’s ennui, These ruthless Christians and the squeamish co- Existence of the comic and the cruel, Etcetera, etcetera. They bear it with a patient shrug. Not thirty minutes in I see it shining there—act three, scene one— Ever so slightly coiled, A strand of Susan Kelley’s chestnut hair. It is her Shakespeare after all, Or rather was until She graduated, packed her life, Left me her books and ten-speed bike, Then shipped to Africa for mission work.

Outside, the glossy autumn morning grows Cantankerous with several squabbling crows. Their fracas punctuates The drowsy, leaden silences in here. We’ll write, we told ourselves. [End Page 235] We’ll call. Two years from nowWe’ll pick up just where we left off. Things seldom end so well. Hilarious Toledo girl. Blue-eyed, Briefly imagined college bride Who figured that I wouldn’t understand The loneliness, the stress, the other boy. They planned, not then exactly, but in time, To be engaged. She cried a little, then was gone. When she apologized, it’s true, I didn’t understand.

Forgive me, Susan Kelley, for the stunned And sulky undergraduate I was. I’ve certainly forgiven you Wherever you are now Where it is surely apple season, too, If not homecoming week When all our ghosts of being young are born. These sophomores fidget in their seats. Their pens make curlicues, Fishnets, primitive huts, flowers in fields.

Bassanio, Portia, Tubal, Shylock, all Are waiting in another room Where Love and Justice doubt That any of us ever gets it right.

I’d like to look her up sometime, Not out of jealousy Or lust or anything like spite, But maybe just to have a laugh, To say I found this strand of your brown hair, Etcetera, etcetera. And by the way, I went to Venice once. I saw the white Rialto, The great basilica And the Piazza San Marco. I stood a while and gazed Into those questionably green, Unsavory waters of the Grand Canal. [End Page 236] It was autumn. The light Was quite magnificent—a bluish gold. I know that it’s been years And this is anybody’s guess, but still I think you’d like it there. [End Page 237]

Daniel Anderson

Daniel Anderson’s work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, The Yale Review, The Hudson Review, Harper’s, The New Republic, The Southern Review, The Sewanee Review, The Best American Poetry and Southwest Review among other places. He has published two books of poetry, Drunk in Sunlight (Johns Hopkins University Press) and January Rain (Story Line Press), and edited The Selected Poems of Howard Nemerov (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press). His honors include a Pushcart Prize as well as fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bogliasco Foundation. He teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon.

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