She was falling again. Falling so deeply inside herself, she was unaware she was disappearing. Her head and hands blurred first. Then her shoulders and arms, like a fog spreading over her, smeared her. She often did this in her Eighteenth Century Poetry lecture.

There was no reason for her to stay.

No one in the class noticed she was gone. Even the aged professor in the threadbare suit, too concerned with the aged script of the ancient poet, did not see her slip beyond the reach of his voice. The aged professor counted seventeen bodies when he called attendance. Seventeen bodies were there, including the girl’s empty shell in row three, seat seven.

Also there was the poet.

Not the man in the suit with the dangling button and rip in the elbow, hastily patched with unmatched thread. Not he who was counting bodies and droning on and on, reciting his rehearsed phrases. No, not he, but the poet with no face. The poet had disappeared too, leaving only his soul splattered and lost in the type of the anthology. Like the shell of the girl, only the words of the poet remained to be analyzed and paraphrased so they too would become all too clear and black and counted. Words solid, the creator was gone.

So there they were. An aged professor in a worn suit; the faceless poet’s dissected, weary poems; the body of the disappeared girl; and sixteen sleepy students lulled by the drone of the professor’s white-noise words.

Hiss went the soda that the invisible girl returned to her body to open. The contents burst and spit, breaking the silence she believed unbreakable. The sound shattered her thoughts, which receded in splinters from her, leaving her exposed and yearning again to disappear from the aged professor in the worn suit checking for the seventeen.

“Are there any further commentaries concerning the poem?” the professor clicked the long-rehearsed and repeated question into the lifeless air. There was no silence in their minds, but who were they to wonder? Who were they to say, “Who was this poet? What wonderful sounds the words sing. I feel the poet, here, with me. I am the poem.”

The counting killed those words and refused the questions. Negated the lyric. Seven allusions, forty-six personifications, fifteen rhyming pairs, the rhythm of the meter. Art is dead and we killed it.

And the reappearing girl knew that the trite question would remain solid and lifeless in the air. She watched the question hang high above, untouched, and slip spotless out the window. They all watched. The aged professor in the threadbare suit, the girl and the others… unwilling to shut the pane and open their lips.

And it ended.

Each in their own box of silence, moving with focused steps toward the escape; entering privacy once more; they moved outside the lecture hall and into the openness.

The girl gazed at the evening sky, which embraced her solace, and exhaled a chill to her skin. She moved closer to the railing and peered over the river to gaze at the reflection the water supported. The sky engulfed her, pulling her into its power and out of herself. She recited the dissected poem and sent the song on her breath to float out and up and beyond.

For that uncounted moment, she and the poet appeared as he took her hand and danced with her in the darkness.

Then they were gone.

I wrote this piece in 1994 after a university education almost killed the artist inside me. I hope you enjoyed it.