The Moths

The young teacher wipes the blackboard clean
and slaps the dust from his hands.
The lecture ended, his voice hoarse,
the famous names and patches of rhetoric
parcelled and packed away — can be delay
any longer at the door? The lamp light
frames him from behind like a skewered saint,
his feet lapped by an adoring pack of spaniels —
so it seems under the deep blue canopy
of the summer night to the chatterers
gathered in the glow that spills over the steps,
the intricate tactics of learning happily
mingled with gossip, plans for shopping,
paying bills, as the old bell
bangs out its clanky tones —
a kind of clock — and the students
begin to drift away, a few stragglers
ambling across the gravel, then
just a dozen footsteps on the stone
echoing for a moment through the empty Quad —
how late it's getting!
and the teacher imagines them wearily
and yet eagerly embarking on an evening
embroidered with planned and accidental meetings,
books picked up and browsed through,
a typewriter shut with a snap
then opened again and its whirring old motor
tickled into life, the keys whacking out a path
through Literature, whatever that is,
or Writing, those bunches of lies
gathered up like the sheaves of lilies
blowing and nodding at the gate, the warm dark
harmonic with murmurs of music, a bottle
clinking against a glass, friends laughing
and eating together in the next room,
happy for a moment to forget time, that drags
its painful judgment forward day by day,
the appointed hour of an illness and a death — here
a young woman chokes on her own blood,
there, a hundred years ago, a fat man
cries into his pillow uncontrollably —
these scenes diagrammed on the blackboard
as though they'd been copied from an old diary,
fibs and all, and knocked roughly into shape,
given a smart new coat of paint, and
fitted into a complicated jigsaw puzzle
whose picture, when complete, is just a messy
landscape busy with disasters that needs to be
explained by those knotted heaps of language,
sentences tangling and disentangling
across the printing industry and the world
of publishing and spilling at last into
the educational subculture: ‘read this’,
‘next Monday's class’, ‘due today’ —
weaving their complex codes and patterns
on the chalky board, then leaping through the air
to scatter in a dozen notebooks, writhing
in and out of their relationship with learning
and the thrills and fears of competition —
look, two girls are still
stuck in the stripped cogs of an argument,
whispering angrily on the steps
among a whirling cloud of moths, till one
touches the other urgently on the arm — Goodbye,
Good night!

First in, last to leave,
thinks the young man, picking up
his bag stuffed with notes on Expressionism
and the Decline of the Weimar Republic,
two Valium wrapped in silver foil,
a fountain pen, a diary, and the draft
of a short story he's writing based on
a painful personal incident concerning
a young student and a picnic that went wrong.
They leave you, he thinks, but there's
always a fresh crop of young ones
to guide through the Thicket of Books
as best you can, a test of yourself
as much as them, huh! Then the bus
loaded with nodding workers — so much
tiredness! — into the lamplit suburbs,
mile after mile, a humming tunnel in which
he loses his sense of who he is: a reflection
wobbling in the window saying hey, stupid!
wake up!

At home he eats
alone, fixes up the place, has a few drinks,
and sleep takes him up in her long examination,
rolling him over in those waves of half-forgotten
fears and brief flashes of happiness:
someone hurting him, a dog shot dead,
the ocean rising up and flooding the land,
dark storms, then a table being spread for a party —
the sun glittering on the crockery —

and the children quietly reading while
their old teacher beams from the front of the class
and says warmly ‘My good girls and boys!
How much I loved you all, when you were young!'