On weekends I would drive an hour
to her school to study with her there in the library,
a cold concrete place, ten stories high,
with dull gray carpets and thin metal shelves.
 
We'd find a space not crowded,
spread out our papers and books, work in silence
doing calculus and embryology, genetics,
physics and organic chemistry.
 
But sometimes I'd bring Browning or Byron,
Keats, Shelley or Tennyson,
and I’d whisper their lines across the table at her
turning the lifeless, windowless concrete
tomb of a room into a pine forest
shimmering with butterflies and bees
with a softly murmuring brook,
yellow, blue and red flowers covering its bank.
And she’d smile at me then.

Copyright by Michael Estabrook.
Used with the author's permission.