What else is there to do now, though?

Reason and emotion have failed him at the core. Sure, he uses them to navigate the worlds of town and home and father and work, but nothing holds him. He floats above it. Watches himself smile, drive, pay, prepare, talk, even weep, but it is all without tether. He recalls that poem that his high school English teacher made them read. No one understood it. The smart-alec kids asked immediately why the poet didn’t write it in English, and the teacher’s eyes rolled into the back of her head. She sighed. She told them that Yeats did this and that and he is recognized widely as a great this and that by so and so, and none of them really cared, except that she kept talking, and they didn’t really have to listen because it wasn’t notes and it wasn’t about the poem. Then she’d changed her tone of voice, and they all knew she was heading into teaching mode. They’d been surprised and quizzed before by her after just such a switch. They’d learned that she was about to deliver right then, along with one- or two-word outbursts on the whiteboard.

He remembers the quiz that came the next day. The one question that he knew he could answer. The only one that he wanted to answer that whole semester, maybe that whole grade 12 year: If Yeats were asking you his question, “And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?” what would be your answer? He can see the question clear and still in front of him, but he cannot recall his own answer. He would go to it now to reread it. To see where he stood then when he had the time and innocence necessary to make the call. But he and his friends had, on one of those final nights of revels, howled at the darkened heavens and, as though they were in fact Irish Catholic boys liberated from the shackles of institution and creed, burned their notes and that quiz answer with them. He remembers that she’d liked his answer. That she’d given him full marks for it. As he tossed his papers on the fire he’d, through his drunken haze, had a moment of hesitation. The memory of the teacher’s smile as she hands you your work and tells you it was good, and you, then, in that moment can feel the weight of the world on your shoulders, and not mind it.

More, you cry then. More weight.