I was paying bills when Professor H.,
dressed in his salt-and-pepper tweeds, appeared
and clucked, too long a victim of catarrh
and clerical miscues. The wrong iota,
sense goes awry, the statement gets misfiled.
He raised a saturnine brow. “O loveliest
of trees,” he said and decrescendoed. No
spot of ink stained where he’d stood, no scent
of laurel filled the august empty air.
I turned myself to text and death, his two
permanent acquisitions. In the heat
the cherry blossoms fluttered, though no breeze
rattled my papers. Unhappiness, he said,
is best unspoken. Sweet are the uses of
pomposity. Pains and chains and silence.
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