The Subjects of Our Study

The number of students decrease
and those whom walk through campus
wear wrinkled clothes, unkempt as energy
turns toward exam time studies
forgetting the ginkgo blossoms for lists of minerals
like Feldspar, six on the Mohs hardness scale,
qualify couplets of Keats believing
that “a thing of beauty is a joy forever”
failing to feel the humid spring air
their eyes on papers clutched against the breeze
while some mutter equations where G
is a constant for gravity
and if R is the distance between objects
as measured from their centers
then where are our own? And what pulls
one person to another other
than F, the force
of attraction between two objects?

Unable to differentiate between the days
these weeks will fall fast
like leaves caught by the wind
more permeable than Talc
beauty unshared trails
toward a vanishing point
merging multiple concepts
into one, the past
a constant for the present
the force that propels us into the future
a spray of broken promises in our wake.