The Adjunct
Joel Peckham

Dear Bob,

I wanted to thank you for your kind letter. I'm glad you liked the poems I sent--though I think you worry too much
about their "sustained but muted hysteria, desperation." And yes, I am excited about our move to Western Michigan.
Susan deserves the job and they offered me teaching as well. So I will continue on as an adjunct for a while longer at least.
It is beautiful out there, Bob. When we visited I stood on the sand beach and looked out across the water. Its nothing
like Lake Champlain where you can see the mountains on the other side and keep your bearings. More like some harbor emptying into the sea and looking, you can float out and out. The Dean told me that in deep winter, January, it freezes and sometimes the water beneath it breaks through, building great columns of ice and you can walk out among them, a quarter of a mile at least before it starts to creak and give, and then--lookout. And I thought of it, some man or woman, windblown and solemn, drifting out with the great, heaving, living world beneath and all dead calm above, and then the sound, the turning back and knowing you are too far out. And I thought how all poems are like this: bodies trying to escape themselves, with some fool writing, reaching after them, out of them--an adjunct to wind, to some lost, longing call across the ice, some cry that won't be heard at all, or at least not in time, but out of it and part of it. And there are so many of us, Bob, hunched over desks and trying, trying to make a life of it as if there could be nothing else or you've forgotten the reason, so it isn't even destructive it just is--the walking out, the step and step and step without future or even past, only the need to keep going, the not-slip, and not-give-up and not-dare-think it doesn't matter because it has to, even if only as a part of the call, the cry for every part-time, full-timer, every distant, unreachable, freezing one of us, thinking lord dear lord what have we done to ourselves, to each other?

love,

joel
Holland, MI August 21, 1999