Sailing Alone Around the Room

by Billy Collins

Schoolsville Glancing over my shoulder at the past, I realize the number of students I have taught is enough to populate a small town. I can see it nestled in a paper landscape, chalk dust flurrying down in winter, nights dark as a blackboard. The population ages but never graduates. On hot afternoons they sweat the final in the park and when it’s cold they shiver around stoves reading disorganized essays out loud. A bell rings on the hour and everybody zigzags into the streets with their books. I forgot all their last names first and their first names last in alphabetical order. But the boy who always had his hand up is an alderman and owns the haberdashery. The girl who signed her papers in lipstick leans against the drugstore, smoking, brushing her hair like a machine. Their grades are sewn into their clothes like references to Hawthorne. The A’s stroll along with other A’s. The D’s honk whenever they pass another D. All the creative-writing students recline on the courthouse lawn and play the lute. Wherever they go, they form a big circle. Needless to say, I am the mayor. I live in the white colonial at Maple and Main. I rarely leave the house. The car deflates in the driveway. Vines twirl around the porch swing. Once in a while a student knocks on the door with a term paper fifteen years late or a question about Yeats or double-spacing. And sometimes one will appear in a windowpane to watch me lecturing the wallpaper, quizzing the chandelier, reprimanding the air.