goddamned finals
a bout of uncharacteristic sun has lured me out into the open. we set up a table and two chairs in the backyard, amidst the garden trellis and its cross-hatched shadows that unroll across the flagstones over the day's languorous subsidence into evening. it's here that I revisit the French Revolution through thin text and pages bleached white by the sun, squeezing history out of the arid narrative: the crumbling of that monstrous Bastille, a dethroned monarch staggering to the guillotine, the frenetic screams of a nation gone mad with terror. in the drowsed summer sunlight, I can almost hear the gunshots through the page.
but committing all this to the cramped lines of a three-hour exam script - that's a different matter, and one I'm not looking forward to when the finals arrive next week. especially not when there are days like today outside: a soporific, pleasantly warm day slumped against the window, pleading for idleness and the feel of green grass between the toes. on days like today, if not for imminent exams, I would dissolve into the picnic mat, leaving behind a book of Billy Collins' poems, open, rustling in the plangent summer breeze.