The master left the two of us to talk, and we realized that we lived in the same entryway, his suite at the bottom and mine on the fourth floor, a cellist named Julia Tom between us who practiced in the early mornings. I admitted to him that I often sat on the stairs beside her door to listen to her play.

“Is there a composer you very much like?” he asked me.

“I don’t know a lot about classical music,” I replied, “or poetry either, to be honest.”

“That’s all right. That’s what you’re in school for.”

I was thankful for Professor Heaney’s kindness, and as I left him, I promised myself that I would devote more time to poetry, and would take a music class so I could at least learn about the composers whose pieces my cellist neighbor played. I felt inspired to return to my room and find poems to read, so I walked back to the courtyard where there were more people after the sun came out and it got warmer. I decided to trace a meandering path through the gathered guests, waving at friends I recognized, before I headed to my entryway.

“That girl looks like my girlfriend,” I heard someone say just as I left the invisible loop that bound the crowd, and I didn’t turn around so he would keep thinking I was a girl.

When I got to the end of the winding circular stairway that led to my room, I settled in bed with the party just a set of fuzzy figures outside my window and opened my thick Norton Anthology with its onionskin paper to look for the section on Christina Rossetti. I’d been thinking a lot about the last poem she wrote, called “Sleeping at Last,” and realized when I opened the page that I already knew it by heart, as my eyes passed over the first stanza:

Sleeping at last the trouble & tumult over,

Sleeping at last the struggle & horror past,

Cold & white, out of sight of friend & of lover,

Sleeping at last.