A Fading Professor On a February Friday
A FADING PROFESSOR ON A
FEBRUARY FRIDAY
On a cold, gray day
that made cold and gray
synonymous with abyss,
she came to his office with
two new drawings that advanced
her thesis about ecological design
in a coastal Canadian city
She had done something to her hair,
something else to her nails, nothing
at all to her eyes that were almond,
Sephardic, Israeli, in a way that gave
new meaning to deep brown and soft
It was four twenty-five on a
February Friday, eight degrees outside,
the lake-effect snow horizontal in the
wind, the big building next door an uncertain
arrangement of blurry white lights in the dark
afternoon; and the requirements of winter,
the so-called spring semester, were wearing
him down like the arcane rituals and the
strict prohibitions of an ancient religion that
could no longer offer any comfort or solace
in our savagely modern and turbulent times!
With a professorial manner that just barely
camouflaged a nearly naked ambivalence he
invited her to sit and to roll out her drawings,
discuss her ideas, while he silently and subtly
escaped to the weekend for rest and repair of
an overextended and overworked soul
Responding with energy and apparent aplomb
to each point she made, he was actually
gone – like the sharp after-image of a
sudden bright light, he was seemingly real
but gone just the same, off to a place where
the snowfall had stopped and the susurrating
cadence of the single frame drum and
a singing prayer bowl summoned him for
dinner, for deep meditation, and an
agnostic’s prayer addressing gratitude
and grace beneath a stained glass sky
fading slowly into night
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