In the House of the Latin Professor

All things fall away: store fronts on the west, ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers. The diminishing neighborhood sprawls under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm, the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted. Inside the cottage a bay window translates the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled as the house turns slowly beneath the drift of tree branch and sun. We have come to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets over the fat reading chair and the piano’s mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s blur of black notes. Among a turmoil of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom we imagine a flourish of light, her husband loosening the sash of her white silk robe, his beard brushing the back of her neck. Amores, the art of love, of words lifting like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost risen to music. We lock the heavy door and walk away from the silence, the lone hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house.