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I was 44. She was 18. I was her professor. She was my undoing. She was a flirt. I was a letch. She was smart and sassy. I was pompous and sardonic. She loved to tease me with her sex appeal. I loved being teased, but felt like she brought me to my knees and knew it. She was unrelenting. I was unrepentant. She was the young spark that reignited the flame hidden deep beneath my gray ashes. It was a match made in hell and I yearned for the tongues of fire licking my loins. I had been in purgatory for so long that it was either commit to my sins or admit that I had copped out on life. I chose to sin bravely. But not just yet.
It would be another six years before my defenses melted. Six years of excruciating distance and proximity that would prove both a delight and debilitating distraction. She would write me suggestive, alluring, and blithely innocent emails. I would respond with allusions and innuendo.
Back when she was still my student, I was teaching Emily Dickinson and she wrote her final essay on the poem, “The Angle of a Landscape.” The poem reads:
The Angle of a Landscape —
That every time I wake —
Between my Curtain and the Wall
Upon an ample Crack —Like a Venetian — waiting —
Accosts my open eye —
Is just a Bough of Apples —…