Past darkness he pitches bits of plaster.
Bats wobble and dart. My eyes are small
and dull, he writes an artist friend, of
a greenish brown; hazel I suppose. Grey-
gold, the suicide's own eyes put out
with a wire and stick in a nettled field—
he's seen the boy at mass—a medical
apprentice, he later learns, who likewise
liked to paint. In mind or body or both,
I too shall give away. Then, in a dream
his body does give way, or his mind
as the crucified hand he sketches
reaches toward him; he wakes
aroused. A gas-lamp flickers across
the chamber pot, his wall's moldy
rings. The stacks of exams he knows
are enough to carry him to spring.
Christ's work, his director assures,
such tests. Of his annual lectures
a student remembers best
not some theory of divinity nor sixth
form's elegiac storm, but the afternoon
when pressed for his Latin cribs
how he confessed to a toothache instead;
and how the excitable Hopkins dashed
from the room and bade the boy to follow—
out of the building, across the yard
where the priest climbed twenty feet
up a rain-slick football post
above St. Stephen's green. Pain's remedy
is prayer, he exclaimed, tight-walking
the iron stretch between the poles,
or distraction. Now tell me how do you feel?
Yet, there are aches Hopkins knows
that are too real. I never saw a woman
nude, he tells a class. And glancing
from his text, I wish I had. It's hills
he sees instead, and the beak-leaved
boughs he sketches in a letter as trees
outside his window scrape and wheeze
in darkening forms. His December's
almost worn. My Father, my God—
the daily breviaries past. Gnats circle
and flit toward the glass. The sky turns
wet and mild. A faint rasping
in his chest: how long does the sun have left?