i.
This morning, in tallish grass beside my car, a dirty baseball
sat like a runaway moon beside a rabbit working her athletic
jaws across the lawn with a typist’s frenzy for QWERTY—
an alphabet of appetite. The day felt fresh, full of benignity.
After all, gravity could have planted that baseball with its
scar of red thread, 216 chevron stitches, mid-windshield.
Or hammered my unsuspecting cranium with a concussion,
disrupting the buffet breakfast. And that furry sex-crazed
herbivore, strangely associated with resurrection, could have
been a rat, emerging from the gearbox, having made my car
his honeymoon hotel—like that sly one, last April, who
assembled a two-bedroom, two-bath love shack right inside
my engine. Isn’t it a miracle that most days, most of us,
make it to noon? Given all that could fail us—or will soon.
ii.
Given all that could fail us, or will soon: humbug philosophy?
Or how most of us kedge the workweek—make it on time,
make it to lunch, to break, to five (or six, seven, eight).
On the highway, driving to work, I think of Lord Byron,
born with a clubfoot, swimming across the icy Hellespont
to imitate the myth of Leander—who nightly swam to his lover
holding a lamp to guide him to her bed. Byron, fleeing creditors
and rumors of unseemly lust, pulls a stunt: is there anything
more natural, after scandal, than staging a war or a bath?
A trucker tailgating me speeds up, lane-hops, and screams
something profane. I think of you at home, rousing, while I
dodge the misogynist in the four-by-four. What won’t I do
to get back to your door? Who hasn’t swum out too far, among
strangers, in the dark, chasing a dollar, a glimmer, a spark?
iii.
Strangers, in the dark, chasing a dollar, a glimmer, a spark:
last night, watching dusk come, watching trees lengthen,
watching a scruffy neighbor trail his blue-eyed husky
(the canine jaunty, purposeful), watching you across from
me on the porch as we let day melt with the ice in our gin,
and let the deeper shadows auger in as streetlights flicker
with their hazel halo of sodium haze. I want to inscribe
ordinary days with something less faulty than memory,
that feeble recording device, and press the best of hours
like some rarest flower, some species found once or twice
in a lucky life, into a fussy Latin-labeled herbarium, such
as was kept by Dickinson, that maestro of the maelstrom
of the human heart in its peculiar, arctic, violently floral
weathers. You, my Hellespont lamp, temptation, tether.
iv.
In all weathers: you, my Hellespont lamp, temptation, tether
—or Neptune, calming the waters, when I fret as if it were
my actual job: not asking students to track others’ minds,
others’ plots in the casual forensics of language. Crossing
the threshold, I remind myself I am in charge, costumed
accordingly. Why the vestigial doubt in my own authority?
Something in the fact that my father was also a teacher? That
it is always, in my mind, his job? My earliest memory: sitting
on a tall wooden chair, legs dangling midair, as he read to his
class from Joyce’s “The Dead,” and I felt the shock of twin
revelations—teenagers, twice my size, feared him more than
I did. And Joyce’s snow, in my father’s vocal radio, turned
me ice cold on a sweltering day. No name then for metaphor,
but the metallic scent of language, potent as spell or hunger.
v.
The metallic scent of language, potent as spell or hunger:
what remains at two o’clock, four courses taught, while
I queue with colleagues for coffee, talk of summer plans:
seaside rentals, jazz festivals, glamping in the Everglades.
I smile and nod—there are no alligators, rip tides, riffs
or licks in our schemes. Neither of us will scale anything
but our desks (or each other). I think of Adorno’s take
on hobbies as what make the worker feel individual,
aesthetic, free. How, in pastimes, we are still employees,
spinning stories of self that lend productivity to leisure,
publicize a private, emblematic pleasure. By this metric,
we are as boring as the Brownings, too smitten to bother
with furniture or cooking. How to say you are my stay
—with you, I travel profoundly home, utterly away.
vi.
With you, I travel profoundly home, utterly away. Last
summer, the city hospital lent us new knowledge of reality.
On the Fourth, as fireworks flared, a sudden pain. That night,
ricocheting fever, rickety pulse: an emergency we face
with studied calm, speeding across town for triage, tests, hail
of urgent acronyms. Without an answer, they dose morphine
and, in the drift of drug, talk of ills from tick-bites to cancer.
In the bath of fluorescence, above the nurses’ station, a binder
blithely labeled “Death Notes.” Delivering dinner, two orderlies
joke about a cadaver, too large for a body bag, they snuck down
the service elevator. Nearby, an enraged woman curses, in three
shrill languages, at her adult children. Beckett play in full effect,
we at last get a diagnosis, a promised return to health. But these
nights, apart from you, I depart from myself. Become some other.
vii.
Apart from you, I depart from myself. Become some other.
After the last meeting, Musket Dave, colonial historian, joins
me for the trek to the parking lot: by the ladies’ room, I excuse
myself from the War of 1812 and wait for the coast to clear.
In bursts the French professor for her Wednesday weeping.
I dig tissues from my purse and duck into the hall, to the fire
exit, nodding at Jim, the janitor, who moonlights as an exorcist.
Ghosts, he says, they have a certain smell. After nine hours,
I’m sure mine needs a rinse. At last, humming the highway,
navigating an hour’s honk and fender, turning onto our block,
I wonder where in the house I might find you. In the fenced field
behind our yard, Little League is on. I park as a small moon sails
through the hickory and falls, in tallish grass, its bright red chevrons
pointing forward, pointing back in the double weft of time’s arrow.
Heather Treseler is author of Auguries & Divinations, which received the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry, and the chapbooks Hard Bargain and Parturition; the latter received the international chapbook award from the Munster Literature Centre in Cork, Ireland, and the Jean Pedrick Award. Her poems appear in The Irish Times, Harvard Review, The Iowa Review, and The American Scholar, among other journals, and have received the Pushcart Prize, W.B. Yeats Prize, Missouri Review’s Editors’ Prize, and Narrative Magazine’s poetry prize. She is professor of English at Worcester State University and a scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center.
