THE HORIZON AT OUR FEET

My father said, “Your work

is never over- always

one more page.”

This

from a traveling man whose life

was always one more mile.

I told him that.

“Sometimes

I hate the road,” he said,

“it’s made me so I’m never

happy in one place.

Don’t

you get started.”

I never did,

spending my days at universities,

my nights at home.

Not

typically the academic, not

totally at home at home,

I think of how I could have lived

and come up blank.

What’s

better than sharing all you know

and all you don’t with students

who do just the same?

Even

on the worst of days it justifies

the time.

Or inking out

your real future on white

paper with a fountain pen

and listening to what the writing

teaches you?

Compared to walking

on the moon or curing polio,

it seems so ordinary.

And it is.

But isn’t living ordinary?

For two and fifty summers

Shakespeare lived a life

so ordinary that few scholars

deal with it.

And what of Faulkner

down in ordinary Oxford, Mississippi?

Or Dickinson, the great recluse?

Or E.B. White, the writer’s

writer?

Nothing extraordinary

there, but, God! what wouldn’t

we give for one more page?

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