In the House of the Latin Professor

By B. H. Fairchild b. 1942

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.

Source: The Art of the Lathe (Alice James Books, 1998)

Biography

B.H. Fairchild was born in 1942 in Houston, Texas, and grew up in small towns in Texas and Kansas. The son of a lathe operator, he attended the University of Kansas and the University of Tulsa. His poetry explores the empty landscapes of the region of his birth, and the lives of its working-class residents, including his own family and friends. Frequently described as a poet of the “sacred,” Fairchild’s work has gained renown . . .

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