The Exam

By Joyce Sutphen b. 1949 Joyce Sutphen

It is mid-October. The trees are in

their autumnal glory (red, yellow-green,

orange) outside the classroom where students

take the mid-term, sniffling softly as if

identifying lines from Blake or Keats

was such sweet sorrow, summoned up in words

they never saw before. I am thinking

of my parents, of the six decades they’ve

been together, of the thirty thousand

meals they’ve eaten in the kitchen, of the

more than twenty thousand nights they’ve slept

under the same roof. I am wondering

who could have fashioned the test that would have

predicted this success? Who could have known?

Biography

Joyce Sutphen grew up on a farm in Minnesota. She earned a PhD in Renaissance drama from the University of Minnesota, and has taught British literature and creative writing at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. Her first collection of poems, Straight Out of View (1995), won the Barnard Women’s Poets Prize. Subsequent collections include Coming Back to the Body (2000), a Minnesota Book Award finalist, Naming the . . .

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