Here are eight poems I wrote between 1974 and 1981. Unlike the poems in the two part-series I published a couple of weeks ago, which had never seen the light of day, I shared these with friends and others, and I revised them from time to time. They track my transition from student to young professional, from New England to New York. The dates are those of original composition.
1. October 26, 1974
The friend who inspired this poem became, for me, a metaphor for the college experience.
Familiar
You are the winter:
You droop after excitement;
Your frown deadens joy.
You are the spring:
Darting, noticing, reveling;
Blossom before fruit.
You are the summer:
You sunbathe at the ocean,
Indolent and full.
You are the autumn:
You tell me your dreams,
Draw me in close.
2. March 5, 1975.
I remember feeling disconnected during the middle of law school’s three years, but this poem reminds me I sometimes also felt that way during my middle two college years.
Spring, and Other Topics
“Yes, spring makes second semester fun.”
“And May is the nicest month.”
We all affirm in unison
But don’t agree just what was meant.
The talk is ranging wide: to food,
To homework‑‑”But don’t work too hard,”
To innuendo‑‑”Don’t be crude.”
I wish I could destroy this void.
I drop my fork. The words don’t end.
This college crowd would be annoyed
Should thought intrude, but they’d contend
You can’t destroy a void.” Absurd.”
3. January 28, 1976
This poem may have been inspired by unrequited love, but, written at the beginning of my last college semester, it also captures the anxieties I felt for my future.
Tugboat
It isn’t what a ship would want
Confined to harbors, pulling barges,
But tugs get used to mundane tasks
And earning small-adventure wages.
The open sea lies wide ahead
Where dreams and routine work ally
And exotic ports are destinations,
But tugs turn back, new charge in tow.
You drew me to you like the sea
A glimpse of something beautiful
That pointed through the spray to courses
Finely charted by your spell.
But just when I breathed the ozone air
You had me turn around for shore.
4. April 12, 1980
I moved to New York City for my first post-law school job at the end of August 1979. Eight months later the city’s transportation workers went on strike and, for several days, I joined Legal Aid Society colleagues and hundreds of thousands of other Brooklynites tramping across the Brooklyn Bridge to our jobs in Manhattan.
Trust in Wood
In Memory of the New York Transit Strike of 1980
A slat of wood, four inches by twelve feet,
Dented, discolored, ignored by us
But for its spring as we walk;
And thousands like it, length against length,
Stretching for a mile, held only
By nails and transverse slats beneath:
The wickerwork pedestrian path
Down the center of the Brooklyn Bridge.
Through the gaps beckons
The gray East River.
How can I trust the engineers and carpenters
Who gauged the stress the path would bear,
Then left it there, sagging
To the tread of a million feet?
Can I trust the wood
That gets its strength
From a density of unseen atoms?
What if a slat split apart
And my foot plunged through? Then me?
I would scream, of course,
On a burst of adrenaline,
But would I have time for terror?
After I had fallen so dramatically
And they had lain the blame on someone,
They’d send out a maintenance crew
To replace the broken slats.
The crew would not pity the divorce
Of those once-clinging atoms,
Perhaps not even me,
But gaze down with awe on the river.
O Brooklyn Bridge, you miracle
Of minutiae and causal connections,
In return for periodic repair,
Platform us as you do
Faithfully in air.
5. December 13, 1980
By the time I moved to New York, I was reaching the end of a religious phase that began around my college sophomore year. My old agnosticism was reasserting itself, but with an abiding appreciation for those who keep the better parts of religion alive.
The Zealot
I had no idea the middle‑aged woman
Waiting, like me, for a subway train
Would change the subject to the Second Coming.
Primed to proselytize,
She thought good advice
Outweighed bad manners,
That now I might be saved.
It was different in my childhood.
Church pews evoked sore backsides
And atheism ravaged every bended knee.
Now, zeal accosts you in the street,
Is admired in a President,
Raises bible study class attendance,
Converts born Christians to born‑again Jews,
Suburbanites to Moonies.
Yet there it is: spirit,
The pole round which
These whims chase each other,
Disguising it as anything
But the still point.
The train arrived and I said goodnight.
I did not say I only sought
A quiet heartbeat
In the rush-hour crowd.
6. December 13, 1980
Here’s the second and last of my 1980 religious poems. As with “The Zealot,” it was inspired by experience, here my introduction to a certain Catholic priest. Perhaps in part because I respected how he handled the difficult quandaries he confronted every day of his life, I took a liking to him. In describing him, I took numerous liberties. For one thing, I had no idea of his visual appearance.
After working on the poem, I sent it to Joseph Brodsky. I’d stayed in touch with him since taking a course with him in 1975. He liked it. What greater gratification could a young poet aspire to! Some years later, the New Yorker‘s poetry editor said she didn’t. Oh well.
To a Priest
Your room is disconcerting:
A single bed against a crumbly wall,
A solitary, straight‑backed chair,
Drawers jutting out at angles.
Of course, Jesus presides,
With his high forehead and impassive mouth,
From a naive painting
Lacking exegesis.
You look as withered in your forties
As your room is bare:
Shallow cheeks, too sharpened features,
Unkempt, discolored hair.
Dated adolescent slang betrays
The care you take in common speech,
Your deference is marred by petulance,
And your comments feel flirtatious.
But you have no clutter to distract,
And your friendships are regulated,
Therefore kept.
And you live where God isn’t always
An expletive or last resort,
Where prayer is routine as washing.
As if abandoning all pretense,
You bring from your locker a dark
And hardly holy bottle. As you pour
Your impish grin reveals
The self‑irony that redeems.
I leave you, perhaps forever,
Perhaps to denigrate religion.
But I’m grateful that you stayed a priest,
Proving God deserves a calling.
If it were me, I’d lose the thread
In the politics of priesthood
And the knowledge of my failings;
Lose completely my occasional sense
That God is the only question.
7. February 26, 1980
People who have never met a blind person, which my experience says is the majority, have a wide variety of reactions when they do. Here’s one.
At the Crossing
1
It’s strange I’m talking to you,
Half‑wanting it, half‑avoiding it,
And how evenly words come,
Neither of our voices raised.
When we met an hour ago,
Your white cane was the border
At an alien country.
But you’re made of the same tissue‑‑
Have a clearer skin than I.
Still, your involuntary defect
Makes me dawdle at the crossing.
Dare I mention a passing boat
Or how the days are getting longer?
Should I offer to pour you more tea
Or wait for you to ask?
You must tell me.
How can I get you to tell me?
Just one word might scratch a nerve
Like chalk screeching on blackboard.
2
Imagine we met again and walked
Together by the river’s edge:
Would you become insistent
While I was still uncertain?‑‑
For I’d hate it if you welcomed me
Before I could be glad.
From this side, your landscape has
No mountains, waterfalls or trees,
And I know nothing of the scenery beyond.
For now, then, let us say “hello’s”
As if sending postcards
While I become accustomed
To the thought of travel
In a barely-charted land.
8. March 28, 1981
By contrast, this poem evokes a moment when a woman’s compensation for my disability deepened feelings of intimacy.
Image
The fire in the hearth illumines
A patch of deep blue carpet,
The coffee table’s gleaming edge
And our restful bodies.
I wouldn’t know, but that you told me,
And might, when told, have felt left out.
If it were money, you’d give me yours.
Instead, you give me your perceptions:
Not reciting them as facts,
Or easing guilt, or triumphing
That you have something I have not,
But making from them
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