Poem Today, as every previous-year’s day, I’ll meet a new batch of students In my poetry class. May be I‘ll talk to them on Chaucer On how he d emocratically portrayed his characters Or, may be, I’ll, as always, Romanticize Ginsberg as a Hippi-hero And elaborate his experiments with sex and drugs; Or, I may be overtaken by the personal life of Yeats By failures of his love life More than the philosophical visions in his poems. They’ll have expectations And may end in impressions; I’ll also have expectations But I’ll need to continue on those impressions, The way I’ve been doing these many years. In the classroom They’ll be my students Or, I will be their teacher, by reciprocation. Very consciously, we’ll build and maintain the distance Of our being—as a teacher, as students. Each day, we’ll interact with each other Through faces-- foamy smiles this time, and frowns at other times. In the turn of the year, before my poetry classes
The Way I See the World