Winter faces falter

Your face

for Robin Grove

I see your faceacross busy rooms,or in a street of strangers.Your facefamiliar and wry,eyebrows leapingwith the furious farce of it all,your tears of wicked enjoyment.

Sometimes I hearyour laugh,generous and knowing,your irreverence and awein quick-step;your lightning transformationsinto joy, from resignation.You've been gone a year now.The world is dulland unillumed.

You moved lightlywith your dancer's stepand your gentle, gracious handsthat knew Mozart and Bach,soil under your nails,old-fashioned hymns,and a child's rounded head.Your heart was woven with the wordsof Shakespeare and Donne and Eliot,words you gave awayto so manyhungry to hear,words freightedwith your humble gratitude,your precise cautions, measuredby your inimitable, dancing self.

Facing South

Up in the Arts tower,below the south lawn'ssmooth hilland subterranean carpark,the class is facing further south into winter light.They are doing Donne on death -Per fretum feberis -digging, desultory, for resonancehalf-remembered, or learnedrote in Lit One.Before the poet's obsessionswhite winter faces falter,too alive to feel the gripof hard earth,the gnarl and dragof unimaginable history.Faces too fresh, trickedpale in the cold light,already scan for the hour's end,the next allotmentof learning before lunch.And who is shetutoring in ignorance,to reignitethose old Renaissance whisperings?What can the young doagainst such wizened knowledge?            "They thought like that, then,there was more dying,            you know, when they were pretty young.The plague, wars, bad sanitation."The hour dwindles, uncaring, to its close.Outside, light shiftsin soft waves, movingover the emptied room,not expecting, as it goes,sympathy or even acknowledgement.Vacancy braces itself,10.15 to 11.45,next class, same topic,same burrowing blind lifestoring up its grains of cultureharvested against stupidityand the long winter nights.