Tragi-Comic
She hears growling from invisible spirits.
He sees gray ghosts gesturing with their hands
and splitting their sides with laughter.
Old Professor Nicholson used to tell his story over and over:
"Did you hear, " he would say, "what the tailor from Italy
said to the classicist who brought him trousers to be mended?"
Rabelais, raising brown ale to face red like Santa Claus,
clouds over.
Mikhail Bakhtin on the other side of time pauses at his writing desk
staring into string theory.
Petronius dictating the true history of a werewolf
to fearful Trimalchio pauses at the crossroads with quizzical lips.
"Euripides?", says Professor Nicholson.
The question mark is lost in the howling.
[copyright EAC 2010]
