Two roads diverged in a yellow woodI took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

Wilson closed the book and eyed his students. Most met his gaze. My question for you is, did life turn out well or poorly for the poet, taking the less travelled road, that is? Was he happy he took it?

He was happy he took it, a pretty girl who sat in front volunteered.

I think so, too, another girl said. The girls were usually the first to answer. He let the students call out their ideas. If he heard something he liked, he asked the students to explain what they meant.

It sounds like a happy poem.
If it's happy, it's too too
Too trite? Wilson suggested.
That's it.

A boy spoke for the first time: The poet says, I will tell this with a sigh!’ So it's sad.

Can't you sigh with pleasure? Wilson asked.

They talked on till the end of the class. Wilson was good at leading discussions. At least half the class talked and in the end, as he hoped, there was no agreement. He put his looks and papers in the old leather bag he had used for 40 years, waved to the class and left. His mother gave him the bag when he started teaching. This was his last year. Forty years. The Jews were 40 years in the desert.

He suspected Frost was happy with the choices he made in life. Luckily, he was a good poet, for he sacrificed his wife and children for his poems, put them to farming the hard Vermont hills while he wrote his poems. He probably regretted that: his wife hated him, never forgave him; a son committed suicide. He was a vain, shallow human being, albeit a great poet. God forgave him for writing well.

He waited for the bus near the library. It still ran through the Ateneo, which was good for poor students and poor faculty like himself. Probably there was no clear answer. Frost was pleased he had chosen to write, yet sad about the family and at the end maybe sad about his posturing. Take the road less travelled, he told students, but the stakes are high. You must take good and bad, as children do in their games. It's only the Gospel that separates good and bad.

Tombolero was his surname, but he didn't like it and never used to it. When he introduced himself he only said, Wilson,” as if he were a famous model or a pop singer.

He lived alone in a tidy house near the Capitol Golf Course. You went into it through a squatter area that had grown up between the road and his house, which made his quests uneasy when they came to see him. He let the poor children play on the grass around his house which was the only grass they had. In the late afternoon he took a glass of white wine out and sat down in a lawn chair a little ways off from the children. The trees of the 6^th fairway showed over a cement block wall.

But what if you had no choice? What if there was only one path in the yellow wood, and it went up and down and around and never led anywhere, so that sometimes you asked God to put an end to the journey?

Wilson wasn't sure he was gay until his early twenties. Later on he found it hard to explain to his friends how he could be so unknowing. He was like the woman who gives birth and tells people she never knew she was pregnant. There was less talk about the whole matter when he was a boy, for one thing. He went to parties, danced, kissed the girls and found it fun, because that's what the other boys were doing, that was the game. He was surprised to hear what other boys did to girls and the girls to them. They were clearly in a different game.

Others recognized it in him before he did himself. At a movie when he was ten or eleven, the friend he went with left to buy candy, and a man who had been sitting a few seats away moved next to him. He put his hared on Wilson's thigh and moved it slowly toward his fly. I knew you'd like it,” the man whispered. It felt like an electric charge. He jumped up and ran to the back of the movie house.

In college other gay boys in groups of two or three spoke to him in ways he couldn't really understand. He knew the words, but the allusions seemed out of context. Once they talked about Elizabeth Taylor and watched for his reactions. When there was none, they walked away. He went to dances and took girls home and kissed them, but after a little while they seemed angry at him and left him in the hallway.

He never met a girl he loved enough to marry. He liked many, and he was at ease with many of them, but he never wanted to settle down with one. As his friends married one by one and seemed to be happy, he worried something was very different with him.

He went to a beach in Cavite with friends one day. They took a table shaded by a nipa roof near the water and drank beer, played cards swam. He was in the water up to his waist helping one of his friends learn to swim. He held his hand under the boy's stomach to help him float and practice kicking and the strokes. The flesh was soft and cool. His hand moved of itself to the boy's trunks and inside. He found the young man was waiting for him. He felt a powerful throb in his groin, like a punch; his knees weakened. They pushed out further away from all the others and stayed by themselves the rest of the day, touching and wondering. They read no more that day. It was the young man's first time also.

He taught in the Ateneo High School, while he got his MA in English, and then with the Ateneo's help he took his doctorate at Columbia in New York City. His thesis was on an obscure poet who died in the Bronx. He could never get it published, and made that an excuse for not writing anymore. He concentrated on teaching and in time became a very good teacher. What he did, and no other teacher, was invite students who weren't happy with the marks he gave for their stories or essays or poems to do them over. He corrected the efforts carefully and returned them as long as the student kept trying. He told them he would never give them a lower mark. They could only improve. He wrote poems that were printed in the magazines.

He never lived with another man – the Philippines was not ready for that then – but he had relations that lasted years. When they were by themselves he was very content: he had found a place of light and peace, of tipsy happiness in corner of a threatening world. His last relationships was more than ten years in the past. He was now 65 and alone. And then one afternoon when he sat on the lawn, after the children went to their homes, a cat he had seen for years in the squatter area came slowly up the path to the front door, and lay down beside his chair. It was shaking, one eye was squeezed shot, its coat was more lint and dirt than fur. When Wilson went in for dinner he put some milk for the cat. It looked half drunk with the one eye shut.

In the morning the cat was still there and when he came home from school. They watched the sunset over the wall of the golf course. It's come here to die, Wilson thought, as the night fell. The cat was motionless, flat on its belly with its paws tucked under it.

At first the cat moved just enough to get out of the sun, but soon it couldn’t move at all and Wilson had to move it. It finished whatever food he put next to it, but never asked for food by meowing or rubbing against his legs. He started a poem about how the cat came and weakened before his eyes, and its mannerisms, but he didn't know to end it or what was the point of the poem. It began: The neighbor's cat came to my yard to die.”

No one from the squatter area asked about the cat. Wilson knew it was pathetic fallacy to think the cat would mind. He warned his students about making persons out of animals. It's bad for culture when a people talks to its animals, he told them. Primitive people made gods of animals, the eagle, the crocodile, but they never talked to them as equals. For primitive people talking to animals was a great taboo.

A woman came in the afternoon to clean and prepare dinner for Wilson. She had diabetes, and since she took for herself whatever was left when Wilson finished, she never used spices. He never complained, though chicken, pork, torta and even fish tasted more or less the same. She cleaned up and was gone by 8:00 o'clock. After that he was alone. No one came. There was that about gay relationships, when they finished, they were over for good. The happy times in a person's life are few and stand out as stars in a trackless black space, he thought.

He visited his younger sister at Christmas time and in November they visited their parent's graves. His father had died a young man; his mother lived on another 50 or so years, yet he had never considered her loneliness. Young people are careless with those who love them. Even when he was older he failed to notice the awful loneliness that surrounded his mother. If he hadn't been gay, would he have been more careful of her?

Then news came that he and two other professors were to be rewarded for their long service to the Ateneo with a special assembly attended by the student body, the faculty in their academic roles, the glee club, the whole works. Each of the three men was asked to give a short talk.

He decided to finish the poem about the cat and give that instead of a talk. He watched the cat closely, how it stayed motionless for minutes a time, with not even its ears twitching staring at a spot three feet away, then moving its head with surprising speed to attack a fly pestering it. Sometimes when he moved the cat out of the sun, it took the stance of a lion set to attack. There was no sense of time for the cat: there was no past or future, only the present, as if each minute were all of life. At twilight it relaxed when it knew it had gained another day. Not today, it said. Side by side they watched the world. Two creatures, it could be said they waited for death. But why was the cat there? Still he had no ending.

He brought the cat the night of the award, and when it was his turn after the president's speech and the glee club number, he set the cat down beside him at the podium. The audience tittered seeing the old one-eyed cat on the stage in front of the faculty. Wilson hushed them with one of his lingering stares that had quieted students for 40 years. It is not a joke. Neither the cat or I,” he told them.

I've been working on a poem since I met this cat some months ago. Whether it's a good poem or not I leave to my students, who surprisingly usually can tell the good from the bad. He read the first stanza about the cat coming and what it looked like. He told how the cat grew so weak it couldn't move; how he fed the cat and how the two of them waited for death, then he said, I never found the ending.”

He paused and looked around the auditorium. Hundreds of people sat absolutely still. I have the ending.” He got down next to the cat on his hands and knees and then rested his elbows on the floor and looked out at the audience. He told the cat's message: This is how you die. You lie down, put your paws under you and wait like a lion.” Then Wilson roared as loud as he could and flattened himself on the ground.