There’s the Professor of Latin and Greek
trudging up the hill-road at the edge of campus,
and there I am a few steps behind
carrying his Macy’s bags filled with Sappho and laundry.
He’s a night owl, always in rumpled white shirt
and black trousers: lapsed Orthodox Jew,
he calls himself. I clean the dust bunnies
from under his bed in the faculty guesthouse,
transcribe variant versions of poems in the Greek
onto pairs of yellowed index cards,
and listen to his alternations of scholarly obiter dictum
and campus scuttlebutt:
the Professor always knows who’s sleeping with whom
no matter what century it is.
Robert Lunday is the author of Mad Flights (Ashland Poetry Press, 2002), and lives in Bastrop, Texas. Recently published work online can be found at Drunken Boat 10, Agni Online, and Prick of the Spindle.
Archived at http://www.girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/poetry/42-poetry/99-rl-1109-prof
