Looking Into

  [Audio by John Roscoe]

I plagiarized on my philosophy exam. I looked into the soul of the boy next to me. —Woody Allen

They are writing exams and I am thinking of old Woody Allen jokes. Woody Allen is an old Woody Allen joke. Woody Allen is an old rape story. Do we tell old rape stories so we don’t have to tell new ones?  Zeus has a lot to answer for. Maybe Woody Allen should have looked into the soul next to him longer. What if plagiarism is the solution? Maybe you don’t want to read this poem. Maybe I won’t write it. Who am I fooling? You can see I already have. But maybe I’ve written a different poem, one with birds. One starling can swallow another so quickly. I watch my students bend their heads and write. Some wear toques moulded to their heads in tubes of wool rising from craniums: forced draft cooling towers. Aristotle called the heart the seat of intelligence and the brain a mechanism to cool the blood, but when it’s below freezing, a toque is stripped of irony: one grey, one taupe, one red, one maroon, one black. I count three trucker caps, two baseball caps, a black and white bandanna. Eight ponytails, two buns, one pixie cut. One bird can snatch another from the air with a beak hooked to rip intestines. It’s snowing and the goldfinches at the feeder tough it out. No one in this room is thinking about goldfinches but me. And now you. The goldfinch painting by Fabritius is the goldfinch pointing to the soul next to you. A long look into the abyss will prove pathology is not the study of paths. Abyss is just abyss. A lie is still a lie. The clock chews minutes, pens run out like time runs out like I want to run out of the room like I’m giving it up for Lent, for the good of all. One student wears a Chewbacca hoodie, silk-screened fur and a bandolier. No open carry here. I was sad to see Han Solo die but it wasn’t my first father-son murder. Sigmund Freud dreamed us asleep. What can we do with fifty minutes? Philology could be the study of Phil. Depends what side you’re ontology. What are we testing? The abyss is hoarse from telling you over and over that nothing matters. Don’t believe it. If you’ve read this far, you are already a bird.