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Daily
I am stealing my downstairs neighbor's heat,
in this middle season; it's getting to be not quite
enough, the mornings dip lower, clear
and sharp, the sun pushed to a distance
that blinds but does not warm.
My students
will meet me this afternoon, one by one,
in a café a block from campus, wandering
by the small sign on the sidewalk, bundled against
the still-surprising fall wind, passing the door
and doubling back, hesitant about the suggestion
of meeting me where I eat, write, will not address them
with a chalk board from the far planet of a large desk.
In the prime of the lunar
eclipse tonight, I will sit with their papers
ranging out from a list of their names, boxes
plotted in beside Jacobs, M., Nguyen, L.,
and try to bring up each face as I mark
check, check plus, check minus. Were the moon
in a different flux, the sun moving
closer, not its steady backwards winter
glide, I might check plus them all, call
my students one by one and invite them here,
to my table cleared of their undergraduate struggles,
where I live, sleep, warm my feet in heat
coming through from the apartment below.
That they might know this earlier:
childhood presses back from them,
urgently now and ungently.
© Cynthia Grier Lotze
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