MATCHETT: Well, you wanted Mid--you suggested "Midterm."
REED: I thought that would be-- MATCHETT: As, being, being an academic poem, appropriate: "Midterm." REED: As being an academic poem appropriate for an English department.
MATCHETT: And it starts with a quotation from Shylock:
"I am not bound to please thee with my answers."
McCUE: Nice.
MATCHETT: One pencil, forty-seven pens,
all write,
cramming blue books with green responses,
forty-eight heads bowed without a prayer.
I watch, half-reading, from the window sill.
It looks as though each man has something to say.
The hour, appointed,
pursuit held within bounds,
not only the docile should be prepared.
Yet I have known the best I have known
tongue-tied among professors,
temples wet with humiliation,
his leaping beer-warming coffee-cooling metaphors,
stumbling, shackled, across vague smiles.
We fail each other, friends,
we fail ourselves.
Morning before the alarm,
dawn, false dawn, edging the clouds,
long night, rain pounding the downspout,
evening, shifting papers, conjuring the phone
to ring with one voice before I am disconnected,
the drink before dinner, the drive home alone,
all day, treading minutes with love
cramped among faces, I ripen
loss like a tumor clogging the gut.
Time empties the room,
abandoning a ragged heap of answers.
It is my turn for judgment,
who cannot frame the question I am set.
That was a very specific graduate student, one of the best I've known, who flayed, who failed his orals...
...because he froze.