"BACK TO SCHOOL"

STRANGE...

... how this works:
it's more than fifty 

years since I last
"went back to school," 

more than thirty since
I quit a professional 

life in academia; still,
each year, this time 

of year, the dread returns,
the dislocation, the sense 

that I must now leave
home, that soon I'll be 

cut off from everything
familiar, from everything 

I knew and loved; that
once again, this year 

I'll be shoved
mercilessly off
the gangplank into

that dark, roiling ocean
of despair.  Do you, too, 

get this same dread,
at summer's end?   

Are you, like me, still
going "back to school"?