Tuesdays and Thursdays it was Falin’s seminar in the same time period. Another world she wrote to Ben, but a world just as exact, just as precise in its accounts and descriptions, and less like a kid’s game somehow, more serious—though she knew the Psychology grad students would have said the same the other way around: to them it was Poetry that was the game.

“We look now at a famous poem by English poet A. E. Housman,” Falin said, turning the purple mimeo sheets to find the little thing, one of the few in the packet familiar to Kit. He looked down on it, nodded slightly as though in greeting, and then looked up. Kit wrote famose boym in her notebook. “What does it say and how is it made.

“Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

Is hung with bloom along the bough,

And stands about the woodland ride

Wearing white for Eastertide.”

Two couplets, he pointed out, in a meter also favored by the Russian poet Pushkin and others writing in that language. Kit wrote in her notebook D’Roshin boyt. The stanza is very simple in form and thought, and has a figure only in the last line: the cherry trees are girls in white clothes, for church at Easter.

“Now the poet does some arithmetic,” said Falin.

“Now, of my threescore years and ten,

Twenty will not come again,

And take from seventy springs a score,

It only leaves me fifty more.

“Arithmetic is hard to do in verse without clumsiness,” he said. “So poets sometimes like to see if they can do this. And I have learned, though I did not know this when I first read this poem in Soviet Union, that the poet was professor of Latin, and worked for many years on a Latin poet who wrote about astrology, a poem filled with arithmetic in verse. So.”

Kit wrote Sov yetchunion. Then she tore the page from her notebook and crumpled it, looking up to find them all regarding her, including Falin; and she lowered her eyes.

“Now see how he ends this small poem,” Falin said. “He has said that he is young, but even so he knows life is short; here is what he now says:

“And since to look at things in bloom,

Fifty springs are little room,

About the woodlands I will go

To see the cherry hung with snow.

“Now do you see,” he said to them with great strange tenderness, as though for them but also for Housman and the young man in the poem as well, “do you see: the only other figure in this poem is very last word, and it compares white blossoms to tree in winter, covered with snow. With snow, when all blossoms and leaves will be gone. In the very moment of his delight the poem reminds him, and us, that time will pass, blossoms will fall.” He leaned forward toward all of them. “And it may well be that it was not Housman’s thought but the poem itself that produced this meaning; that the poet reached next-to-last line and this rhyme arose of its own accord, with all these meanings. Yes I am sure, sure it did. A gift that came because of rhyme, came because rhyme exists. Because poetry is what it is. And because this poet was faithful.”

They were all immobile in their chairs before him, stilled maybe (she was) by that word faithful. Kit would remember it: the word he used that day.

“And how unlikely is this, do you think?” he said. “To have this coincidence, I mean; these words and this man Housman occurring together at this time; this rhyme, this quickness to grasp it before it passed away. What are the odds of this, of exactly this poem existing in the world, coming into being in this form that we can apprehend, not failing somehow along the way or getting lost? I think odds are astronomical. Only the stars can model odds so great. That is the marvel and wonder of this enterprise of poetry: that we have this—and all its fellows, the real poems—among all other things that we have in this world.

“Which include, you know,” he added smiling, “very many poems that are not real poems at all.”

She was a good student: she had nothing else to do but her homework, and she did it, as she almost never had in high school. On a Friday after lunch she went up to her room to finish a poem of her own due for Falin’s class at two, or maybe to write a letter to Ben. She didn’t think that the poem she was writing was one of the real ones. It was carefully impersonal, artificial even, and she guessed that its cleverness—all it really had to go on—wouldn’t be apparent to someone who knew English only uncertainly; jokes must be the last thing you begin to get. After poems themselves even. Reverse your answer, Love: not no but on.

The letter was the same. In the kingdom of Rayn they used to cut your tongue out for lying—they did, Ben, didn’t they?—but the sunsets were spectacular. Here it’s the reverse. Would he know she wasn’t really talking to him, wasn’t telling him anything because of something she couldn’t tell? She hoped he knew, and she watched her hope carefully, so it wouldn’t betray her to him.

That day she wrote nothing after all. She sat for a time unmoving at her tiny desk and then lay down on her bed. She closed her eyes and thought of having a machine like a tape recorder, only small, not suitcase-sized like George’s, and so sensitive it could record her words as she thought them.

When she woke up, two hours had passed and half of Falin’s class was over.

She lay a moment in astonished shame, feeling pinned to the bed. Except at Our Lady (sitting up in the dayroom chair, head lolling), she wasn’t someone who slept in the day; it always made her feel dizzy and sad and heavy and hateful (as she did all the time at Our Lady). She felt horror too, the first class she’d missed. Oh well oh well. She went out into the silent halls (everybody else dutifully in class) and went to the bathroom to wash out her woolly mouth.

Then what? She sure wasn’t going to walk into that class when it was almost over. She went back to her room and her desk and her letter to Ben. I see Elvis got his discharge. They didn’t wipe that smirk off his face though. If he can get out why can’t you? I’m glad there’s no war going on now Ben except for a Cold War. I really hate that term, Cold War, it almost makes me feel crazy to write it down: a war that’s cold, what could be worse, that freezes instead of burning, everyone frozen in place, without passion or motion, as though it could last forever. But anyway they don’t shoot at you, do they, the bad guys? And you don’t shoot back. So that’s all right.

She opened her French text, and closed it again; she listened to the room and the building, lone footsteps in the corridor, tick of the heater. Weirdly, transgressively free. She put on her coat and went out walking.

Running from the University gates to the center of town, where a comical courthouse lifted a pointy dome, College Street passed by bookstores and diners and an art theater that was showing The Cranes Are Flying, and a coffee shop or restaurant that was a local landmark, the Castle, its front made to look like stone and little crenellations carved above the door.

Kit went into the bookstore, a crowded and cluttered one that had literary magazines and books of poetry and glossy paperbacks put out by university presses, and the New York Times a day late, and more commonplace things too. All her life Kit would find herself to be stingy and close about only one thing, and that was the buying of books, and she would never find out why, much as she questioned herself when she stood in a bookstore pondering the purchase of one, one she needed or wanted but couldn’t bring herself to put down money for, since maybe after all she wouldn’t read it: a kind of shyness or self-effacement. She looked them over now, her covetousness aroused but her hands remaining in her pockets. Among the books in Poetry was one called Terror and the Muse: Soviet Poetry Under Stalin.