Girl In My Class Poem by Denis Mair

Please don't think that low enrollment
Would cause my sparks of fascination
To be anything but widely distributed
Or that they are likely to center and flash up at one point
I am quite capable of deflecting to a cloudy crowd of generality
Though occasioning persons are few
And a particular pair of eyes is one
For the abstract issue of CROWD is not WHICH BODIES
But that bodies of one kind or another are THERE
Hence any persons sitting there would have an effect
So it is not a matter of WHO it may be, but of WHOSOEVER
Thus the REAL can be treated as a sum of possibilities
While the projected, definite encounter of true minds
Is just an empty passageway that some dream imagines
Would lead to an electrified soul

I stand in front of the class
My thoughts are congealed into gelatin
But one face has the range of an audience
Ghostly-pensive or edgy-tired sometimes
Yet ideas of mine keep quivering to life
Whenever she beams that curious smile
That keeps my words jumping to life

She is a scholaress
Be careful about lecturing too much
No telling what long listening might brew up
This many-year harvest coming so early to her
That for a late, old teacher had peculiar results
Can all such be worth carrying
By slim, ripe, sparkle-eyed
Square-shouldered, grave and thoughtful
Down-to-business academatrix?

Cool product of ancestors and their historical rage
Now balanced, enshrined and turned
To quick, tough calculation of circumstance
And therefore what I used to call intimidating
But capable, out of flinty, real-minded view
Of rescuing a certain eccentric, exotic twinge
That helps you give voice to a prospect-vision-idea
Hence generous, reassuring, encouraging
Having a little of merciful Guanyin Bodhisattva
Considering the sounds of the world at pain
Glimpsing a version-model-hope that lifts her spirits
And spirits are always kind enough to lift each other

And so she needs an extra note in her name
Like the uplifting light she sends through a fog of words
Call her scholaressa
Scholaress- scintill- luminatina
Mossolina
Liquilaugh...
... Fresh-ifer astra-gynette [1]
Wind-eye with flowers on sill, and no blind
Meadow-crossing creature in the sunlight
Easily bearing that big inward field
Enjoying the dancing springy movement
of the finely curved reward-body [2]
Around her own bones

The name should contain my thanks
For eyes that got me looking into clouds
Got my eyes turned inside out
Like an antenna for ambient lightning
When I follow listening to my own speech
To get lost behind that cloud