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springs are little room,
    About the woodlands I will go
    To see the cherry hung with snow.
    “Now do you see,” he said to them with great strange tenderness, as though for them but also for Housman and the young man in the poem as well, “do you see: the only other figure in this poem is very last word, and it compares white blossoms to tree in winter, covered with snow.
    With snow, when all blossoms and leaves will be gone. In the very moment of his delight the poem reminds him, and us, that time will pass, blossoms will fall.” He leaned forward toward all of them. “And it may well be that it was not Housman’s thought but the poem itself that produced this meaning; that the poet reached next-to-last line and this rhyme arose of its own accord, with all these meanings. Yes I am sure, sure it did. A gift that came because of rhyme, came because rhyme exists. Because poetry is what it is. And because this poet was faithful.”
    They were all immobile in their chairs before him, stilled maybe (she was) by that word faithful. Kit would remember it: the word he used that day.
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    “And how unlikely is this, do you think?” he said. “To have this coin-cidence, I mean; these words and this man Housman occurring together at this time; this rhyme, this quickness to grasp it before it passed away.
    What are the odds of this, of exactly this poem existing in the world, coming into being in this form that we can apprehend, not failing somehow along the way or getting lost? I think odds are astronomical. Only the stars can model odds so great. That is the marvel and wonder of this enterprise of poetry: that we have this—and all its fellows, the real poems—among all other things that we have in this world.
    “Which include, you know,” he added smiling, “very many poems that are not real poems at all.”
    She was a good student: she had nothing else to do but her homework, and she did it, as she almost never had in high school. On a Friday after lunch she went up to her room to finish a poem of her own due for Falin’s class at two, or maybe to write a letter to Ben. She didn’t think that the poem she was writing was one of the real ones. It was carefully impersonal, artificial even, and she guessed that its clever-ness—all it really had to go on—wouldn’t be apparent to someone who knew English only uncertainly; jokes must be the last thing you begin to get. After poems themselves even. Reverse your answer, Love: not no but on.
    The letter was the same. In the kingdom of Rayn they used to cut your tongue out for lying—they did, Ben, didn’t they?—but the sunsets were spectacular. Here it’s the reverse. Would he know she wasn’t really talking to him, wasn’t telling him anything because of something she couldn’t tell? She hoped he knew, and she watched her hope carefully, so it wouldn’t betray her to him.
    That day she wrote nothing after all. She sat for a time unmoving at her tiny desk and then lay down on her bed. She closed her eyes and thought of having a machine like a tape recorder, only small, not suitcase-sized like George’s, and so sensitive it could record her words as she thought them.

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    When she woke up, two hours had passed and half of Falin’s class was over.
    She lay a moment in astonished shame, feeling pinned to the bed.
    Except at Our Lady (sitting up in the dayroom chair, head lolling), she wasn’t someone who slept in the day; it always made her feel dizzy and sad and heavy and hateful (as she did all the time at Our Lady). She felt horror too, the first class she’d missed. Oh well oh well. She went out into the silent halls (everybody else dutifully in class) and went to the bathroom to wash out her woolly mouth.
    Then what? She sure wasn’t going to walk into that class when it was almost over. She went back to her room and her desk and her letter to Ben. I see Elvis got his discharge. They didn’t wipe that smirk