For a Student Sleeping in a Poetry Workshop

I've watched his eyelids sag, spring open
 Vaguely and gradually go sliding
 Shut again, fly up
With a kind of drunken surprise, then wobble
 Peacefully together to send him
 Home from one school early. Soon his lashes
Flutter in REM sleep. I suppose he's dreaming
 What all of us kings and poets and peasants
 Have dreamed: of not making the grade,
Of draining the inexhaustible horn cup
 Of the cerebral cortex where ganglions
 Are ganging up on us with more connections
Than atoms in heaven, but coming up once more
 Empty. I see a clear stillness
 Settle over his face, a calming of the surface
Of water when the wind dies. Somewhere
 Down there, he's taking another course
 Whose resonance (let's hope) resembles
The muttered thunder, the gutter bowling, the lightning
 Of minor minions of Thor, the groans and gurgling
 Of feral lovers and preliterate Mowglis, the songs
Of shamans whistled through bird bones. A worried neighbor
 Gives him the elbow, and he shudders
 Awake, recollects himself, brings back
His hands from aboriginal outposts,
 Takes in new light, reorganizes his shoes,
 Stands up in them at the buzzer, barely recalls
His books and notebooks, meets my eyes
 And wonders what to say and whether to say it,
 Then keeps it to himself as today's lesson.