A Walk Across the Campus at Night.

A Walk Across the Campus at Night

by james bezerra

At night the campus is an other city.

At night, I’ve found, it’s empty

but for the muses who I hunt there.

Its empty parking lots sprawl like

an asphalt Serengeti. Its empty well-lit

garages with their concrete angles

suggest complex mathematical

models about weight and shadow.

Its silent broad buildings lit by

yellow aura low pressure sodium lamps

like modern castles quiet and abandoned

before some advancing horde which

always follows the moon. Its quads sit empty,

ashamed town squares after a massacre or

an oppressed protest.

The library in the center of campus

glows brightest of all. Its square heavy stone

facade the color of a rocky desert. It almost

hovers like an ancient Egyptian starship,

it’s wide high steps lit up like a landing strip.

Oh, and here’s my sad gaunt English building.

It has a clock on its tower to remind the wayward

poets of the invincibility of time, and that class

is inexorably approaching as is their future

of professional obscurity. Poets so often

lose their power when they leave here,

the world of rent and bills, of stocks and bonds,

of Stafford loans come due and office jobs

retires every hope they’d learned here

how to hope and how to name.

Beyond that: recall what Jimmy Stirling said

of campuses as architectural zoos: the

Film and TV building like half a boat with a hat.

The Math Department rendered in the most boring

sort of boring red brick and even its boring courtyards

are open up to the sky, which somehow is made

to looks boring 73 and a half percent of the time.

The Performing Arts building, which sells tickets

that students can’t afford, looks like a spaceport

made of light and glass and recycled oxygen,

or maybe like one of those boxes

that radio stations put you in, filled with tornados

of money which you can never seem to grab ahold of.

The manicured grounds around it are lit like

a garden party with a moat. Nearby, and unlit at night,

the concentric rings of the earthquake memorial

are surrounded by broken benches made of rubble.

The older building have all the joy of Soviet

apartment blocks, but the botanical garden is

luxuriously overgrown with plants whose

latin names adorn metal plaques stained by rain,

and it is positively infested with feral cats,

who always adore me: because

we always recognize our own.

I like sometimes to sit in the old orange grove

at the edge of campus along a street that

wasn’t here in 1929 when the first trees went in,

maybe as a windbreak against the Depression

blowing in from the East like so much dust.

What once was one thousand five hundred

acres of Mandarin oranges is now one acre

of Mandarin oranges. 400 trees still

in pretty rows: that’s a survival rate of less

than seven percent: A genocide of oranges

has taken place on this hallowed ground.

That wasn’t quite enough for someone though,

so they’ve put in a water feature: a rock fountain

and little creek that’s filled with clipped-wing ducks

which you can feed for a couple quarters in the dispenser,

or for free if you bring bread, like me.

It is pleasant enough here though, the trees and water burble

deaden the city sounds, or maybe, make them sound

like wind. The orange scent always reminds me

of persimmons and persimmons always remind me

of a woman in Ohio who loved me for a week or two

and who always ate persimmons after we made love,

while I smoked a cigarette out her window, and

who when she put me on a train, shoved three

persimmons in my palm and said:

For the trip.

Walking back across the other city

on paths that seem to make no sense but

which probably look nice to birds, and

think of DC or Paris and of boulevards

which move at angles. Crossing the dark think

how nice the moonlight looks across these buildings

and thank I.M. Pei, who never worked here

but who thought a lot about light.

Cross Cleary Court which would look quite

at home in Brasilia: so pretty, so clean,

and so vacant. Juniper Hall with square windows

which look like castle loops for cannons and

the little Noski auditorium at the end of the court,

always so well lit and with its roof jutting

at such a shocking angle as to suggest

a Roman temple has just crash landed.

I cross back across that asphalt Serengeti

and I know that I’m leaving the city empty.

Empty now because I am gone and I am -

I think - its last known citizen. It joins

the ranks of Troy and Machu Picchu,

Chernobyl and Varosha in Famagusta,

Atlantis and the base at Orford Ness.

I am gone and the city is empty without me.

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