December 1, 2011


Left school late last night, though, as ever, I was in a panic to get on to the next thing. One of my creative writing students has something to show at each class, and I have to put her off–yesterday rather gruffly– saying that we need to hear from somebody we haven’t heard from the last fourteen times. At the end of class she asked if there were time to do one more poem. I said there wasn’t, but as the class filed out I suffered a twist of vision and realized she wasn’t selfish, but rather as we wish all our students to be, eager, over-eager, striving, gluttonous for improvement, and I said I had time myself to look at her poem. I don’t know why my thought turned around like that, from irritation to appreciation, but I’m grateful it did. We made real progress on the poem. Her lines are brilliant and flat footed in an almost predictable alternation, and we worked on telling the brilliant and the flat-footed apart. My reward for staying late was that when I stepped onto the Quad, the fat crescent moon and the hard shard of Venus held up a sky graduating from deep blue at the top, through the most exquisite lilac, to flame orange at the western end. It was the most perfect sequence of colors I had ever seen, and the black outlines of trees and the two pools of white fire set it off and gave it scale.

Tiny black spider in the bathroom. She’s built a web in a magazine I was reading, and when I ruined it by picking up the magazine, I saw her scurry, in rather a confusion, across the white floor. She has built again in a safer place against the tub. Her web is very elementary– just one thread, as far as I can tell, to lift her a little above the floor. She has a week before the cleaning lady comes.