“Sure, sure, and Little Sheba will come home, and the three sisters will leave the Cherry Orchard finally and go to Moscow, and a gentleman will come calling for Blanche.”

“No, not a real department job,” I said, as he loaded tubs of yogurt and cakes of tofu into the shopping cart. “Just August at SHS. They have a summer arts festival.”

“You haven’t got a month’s teaching left in you, Paige. Ten years of it and you’re like a hunted thing around students.”

“I’ve thought this.”

“It’s bad for you,” he said. “It is bad. It’s the worst.”

The office lent to me at SHS had gray walls, charts, window shades, heavy black oak furniture, shelves of hardbacks.

August was at full fry. Cicadas sizzled all over everywhere. These were thumb-sized cicadas with sectioned powdery-black torsos. They looked like Inuit soapstone carvings with tomato-red beads for eyes, gold-lacquered wings.

When Raf phoned, I said, “Their noise sounds calculated, like song compositions. I have one going in my head right now that I don’t want to lose. ‘Bug-bug-bug.’ It’s a yellow note followed by a blue note.”

“You fucked any of the physicists yet?” Raf asked.

“They’re weird but not my kind of weird,” I said.

Barny I was thinking, for example. He had a beard and he’d been around Stanford in the quark search days. He had no skill for poetry but as a particle physicist he reported, “We think we have the answers to just about everything.”

“Can you imagine even thinking that?” I asked Raf.

From Freedom Hall, where class gathered, we had an easterly view of the central quad with its statues of Sam Houston and Jefferson Davis and one in black rock of the school’s mascot, a pug-faced Disneyish dinosaur.

I made my opening remarks: “Don’t stick to these patterns and forms exactly. Just allude to them and don’t worry about metricality or rhyming. The form’ll be back there, influencing you, is all. Think more about musicality, although nobody give me song lyrics.”

I said, “There isn’t anything inherently great about rhyme or meter. They’re just framing devices. But you can use them to control how we read the poem.”

I went on talking until I ran out. I took roll. One older man there was someone whose submission I’d rejected. “Carl?” I said. “You’re not ah, listed on my roster.”

Carl was chewing gum. He said, “No bearing on the quality of your rejection, ma’am. The competition was considerable. I regret I’m unable to accept. I’m here.”

The third class meeting, Dr. Gil from West Virginia said, “Here’s a confession. I wrote a new program for my p.c. It wrote both efforts you’ve seen from me. I haven’t contributed one verb, one article.”

Dr. Gil’s colleagues very much liked this confession. There was delighted supportive applause.