Suspended Ceiling

Sometimes you just stare upwards when you've trying to think of a poem.

                                                Suspended Ceiling

                           Across the country, classrooms are covered
                           by acoustic tile ceilings, absorbing sound
                           so students only half hear what their teachers
                           tell them. They absorb sight as well as the
                           bored and window-deprived stare heavenward
                           with Sistine Chapel fascination, counting
                           the craters in the ceiling’s pockmarked, gridded
                           lunar surface, and occasionally – when the
                           teacher’s back is turned – launching a rocket
                           pencil probe skyward to see if it can stick,
                           suspended there like some abandoned relic
                           from the space race’s glory days: the Eagle
                           has landed, as well as the Reliance, Venus,
                           Faber, Staedtler, Blaisdell, and Ticonderoga.

                          When my classroom is torn down or remodeled
                           and the ceiling is recycled, nearly forty years
                           of absorbed sounds may come spilling out
                           of that sonic time capsule: the farts that disrupted
                           many a grammar lesson, the cruel or joyful laughter
                           of 7th graders, my own hoarse voice, and now and then,
                           the silence of new ideas being born.