The college
notes the difference.

The holidays have come
and the students gone,
the structures whisper.

The buildings
on the deserted,
fog-shrouded campus
look like faces.

Eye-windows, hollow and dark,
stare out mournfully
at the empty bike-racks;
the predator’s baffled scan
of a plain divested of prey.

Door-mouths, set grimly,
no longer smile wide:
locked tight against the lonely,
inquisitive wind, they resent
this unaccustomed, unaccountable,
incomprehensible solitude.

The buildings’ cheery caps,
woven of red-baked tile
so in keeping with the season,
seem most out of place here
in the quiet, grey, swirling fog.
There is no cheer to match cheer.
No one has come to the party.

The paths the haunted eyes survey
are unwalked; undriven; empty;
the lamps that pace them, dim;
the grass that laps their edges,
untrammeled; unfrequented
by the athletic, flamboyant
Frisbee-throwers
and their frisky dogs.

Even the steps of Meyer,
toe-feet dipping into
the cold asphalt
of the Library Quad,
their edges polished black
by the wheels of callow,
destructive skate-boarders,
are now silent, abandoned by
their young parasites.

The few hold-out staff members,
burning the thin holiday oil
to keep a few eye-windows lit with life,
are like fireflies buzzing about
in a dry, empty skull;
the illusion of a soul,
only emphasizing the vacancy,
like Noah’s family
after the deluge
on an unpeopled planet.