Here Lies Kilty

Here Lies Kilty (A Professor Looks at Retirement)

A small college
in wintry Minnesota,
a divorce,
DUI,
a quiet dismissal,
and then escape to
the Blue Ridge.
Toting parcels
full up with turtlenecks
yellow pads
and scribbled
logic problems
an autistic son,
two cats,
you arrived on fumes
in a Fiat
cheaply bandaged
with duct tape
and haste.

Each check you've ever
written
is cataloged
by number,
a long gray hair for
every
penny spent on
yourself.
You're a much better
clerk
than you are a professor,
Irish Catholic acolyte
better suited
to be sweeping a
vestry
than tenured in a
a department
rife with blowhards
and frauds.

Every winter you spend
dimes
on beeswax candles
and coal
keeping the cold
and shadows
at bay,
beyond panes
and the pale of your
spindly limbs.
You sit hunched over
an E machine
crafting pages
for Jstor
that no one save
Kant
would read with a straight
face.

In the summer you ride
fifty miles
on your road bike
each blistering day
keeping cancer
away--
the costly doctors
recommend
a leaven of spelt,
but you munch
on bland salads
and treat your ills
with AA.

Ten years will
pass
before Emeritus
and pension,
and you'll meet
retirement greeting
mobs
at the Super Wal-Mart.
You'll thumb a yellowed
treatise
by Husserl
in the break room,
next to Wanda
gulping Monster
and hoarding
Cheez-Its
as if they were
golden trinkets
counting ignominious
hours,
dispensing stickers
and gathering
carts.

Pneumonia strikes
between the Roll Back
Downy softener
and eighty-five,
and your living will
won't
purchase the oxygen
to keep you alive.
Laid to rest
in a bought plot
mourned by three cats
and a son,
eulogized by
a grad assistant
reciting Heidegger
and John Donne.
Across the marble
financed chiefly
by donations
and the community chest,
“Here lies Kilty
Friend to some,
Ineffectual pedant
to the rest.”