Valedictory

A speech that could not have been anything but earnestly prepared, sweated out under a hot light bulb while june bugs thumped against screens, delivered to fellow graduates, relatives, a state senator, the high school principle, and faculty representatives, all seated on bleachers rolled against the first row of seats because the graduating class had no hope of filling even a section of the football stadium, passed unimpeded through the collected consciousnesses, like neutrinos through bubble chambers.