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Rasa The eraser falls off its chalkboard ledge to the floor while the professor attacks the next point in his lecture and students preserve silence, wakeful or not. The long white chalk raps and scrapes its way through facts, dates, numbers, like a blind man’s cane on asphalt; its sightless noise masks the eraser’s plunge, quiet as a catkin in May, or a black bee in November: something hits bottom and oofs a tiny terminal cloud. The bee’s pollen, the catkin’s pollen float off to finish the single-minded task pollen accomplishes by the billion. The eraser’s cough of dust pollinates a silence of old unanswered questions about history, poetry, religion, about polynomials and constants and variables. All that knowledge wiped out, every day, every hour: a sophomore sneezes the French Revolution all over her half-finished crossword. A virginal boy fills with involuntary tears, allergic to the chalky bones of Emily Dickinson. The professor turns away from the blackboard, the point of his harangue comically obvious: a flatlined smudge across his black pants-legs and zipper. Even his dimmest students can see where knowledge has gotten him. Soon enough they will vanish happily down roads strung along white lines drawn by their futures, enticing, receding. At the professor’s dusty shoes the eraser lies, its boiled wool lungs drowning noiselessly with the emphysema of having to inhale every allusion he raised—no, cancel that—every illusion he ever razed.
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