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Creative Writing At semester’s end I tell them that when the novel founders with the bourgeoisie, survivors of the latter are peasants, electricity is gone and movies legends, poetry will resume its place by the fireside of illiterates. Their look (for they too have survived: rehab, bulimia) combines forbearance and that will to take everything under advisement, show no enthusiasm, indefinitely defer judgment. I return their last works, make some grand, self-revealing, verbal gesture. One or two shake my hand as we leave. The campus, former girls’-school absorbed by the costliest university in the country, is blocks from my house. To walk to work! Luck happens. Like the view downhill I pretend is ruins and forest … None of which counts as *teaching, a less fortunate friend reminds me. Whose voice is to most of her students a noise before pregnancy, between some intolerable insult and shooting or being shot; or itself provocation, earning warnings: “You borin’ me, bitch.” Once home – it was fall semester, night comes fast – I drink, field late pleading emails, answer one that thanks me. And think (it’s an end; one philosophizes) how poetry mustn’t be tastelessly pertinent; how taste ruins poetry; how poems are at best anomalous fossils that may or may not be unearthed. How my kids are already scattering to airports, parents, hopefully … How the most smiling and rational times that ever were presented to their young no face but mine, regretful, doubtful, fighting to focus.