So that (during class) we listened to Yo Yo Ma playing Astor Piazzolla music (fitting, for the CD had been a gift from my fellow faculty member Karen Rile) and Zulu Jive playing "A Sambe Siye e Goli;" we listened and wrote of remembered street-scape scenes; we found our best lines. We thought out loud about the expectations we have of writers we read, the expectations we have of ourselves. We asked: Where do we find music on the page?, and the answers were all at once and different—it's Virginia Woolf, it's Rick Nichols on food, it's Maya Angelou; it's the repeated line, the crescendo line, the long line, the short one; it is what is held and what is sloughed away. There was the crowding in, afterward, the slow goodbyes, and there, in the doorway, stood a student from three semesters ago—still tall, still lean, still so smart; my impromptu escort to the 4:48 train.
The color of sun.
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