Poetry:
Farewell to the University

Alan Clinton
Independent Scholar
Poet
E-mail: alanclinton@earthlink.net

I.

The edge of campus is guarded by a stone head in the jungle.
I never see police there
but detached eyes
are passed freely from mailbox to mailbox. It reads:
"For those who have fought, freedom is an experience
the protected will never know."

It was the first object (a gift from the rector)
I met when I arrived.

It's the last message, offered in bits of dust,
I'll read on my walk out, the last time, in early May...

II.

A neo-nazi in plain clothes
noticed I matched strides
with a black man in a long grey coat
a fur hat made from a Russian fox.

He was a student. He was the police.
He had seen a ghost that didn't answer questions.
Do you know this man, he won't speak to me.
He was agitated, jumping around like a ghost.

Earlier that morning, the rhetor, the saint
had passed through me in the hallway
that circles round and round
protecting thin air.
He asked me how I'd been,
as if I'd already been gone for some time.

III.

Because I know
to refuse speech is sacred
to remain silent, profane,

I was on the dizzying precipice of being
and had him against the wall
without touching him.
He melted like Hitler's youth always does.

IV.

If I had touched him, I've walked along the edges of things,
I've heard the whispers of those foxholes,
police, lawyers would have risen up
with digitized ghosts
and their money to expel braves who infiltrate the university
so much collected from the season of raining
made eternal by Lockheed Martin
I would have been the shadow of a drop.

V.

And the rhetor, the saint
would not have lifted a digit--
Heidegger is on the line and
can't be kept waiting.

No, I was lucky to have noticed
the streets rife with single playing cards
and orphaned gloves.

I was lucky that morning
to have ridden the subway
shared a car with coke-bottle glasses
a large deck of cards, too large with worn edges
the one who had been collecting them
or dropping them, a six of clubs
holding back the chance
so that it was soft
and telling me to leave
the university without condition

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