The class was Seventeenth English Literature.
I could be excited by portions of Donne, and Marvell was stimulating when he was stimulated by his mistress, even though she was a bit coy, but for many hours the classroom simply seemed crowded. It was an upstairs room on the second floor of a house on the north side of Valencia Street, one of three such Victorians and not the one that survived the campus expansion into the twenty first century. The walls of the former bedroom now held blackboards, nailed to its thick pastel plaster walls. Its sleek tiled fireplace was closed, its location noted only by a mantel long absent from any heat from any fire, hardly a hearth any longer.
Dillon moved from the front of the room to the left side and back to the front and then down the right wall, talking constantly with equal enthusiasm for the Cavaliers and the Metaphysicals, he paused and picked up the remains of a Styrofoam cup and simply said “Now here is a poem,” and set it back where he found it.
I took the challenge as an assignment.
Sculpture
exhibited on a cold mantel
(shared with a crushed candy wrapper)
once filled
(with piping black hot)
it now marks the labor of one
who viewed destruction tumbling into
once constructed.
snapping and breaking
till the broken pieces fill the broken cup.
Brief Case Poems (1973-1979)