Nostalgia

Remember when ice cream cones were a nickel
And Mrs. Nussbaum’s husband was Pierre?
Remember when Henry was always in a pickle
And, instead of ass, people said derriere?

Remember when girls in their summer dresses
Sat beneath the Biltmore clock?
Remember when everyone knew who Eliot Ness is
And Sam Huff was our favorite jock?

Remember when presidents were presidential
And accountants always on the money?
Remember when Brooklyn was residential
And New Yorker cartoons were funny?

R. Forrey, 2004

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For Phyllis on Her Birthday

July 3, 1994

Here’s to Phyllis, who’s just the right age
To turn, in life’s book, the most important page,
Starting the chapter where the heroine
Begins at last to zero in
On what to do with the rest of her life:
Not as a mother, not as a wife,
Not as a teacher, not as—Oh, what a bore!—
A guardian of the Core,
But as a person, in her own right—
Not down-trodden, not up tight—
Not waking up in the middle of the night
To think of all the trouble she’s seen,
Or even worse, of what might have been—
But sleeping soundly, until dawn,
Then waking up, with the birds, and moving on.






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The Odd Couple

The skunk and the fox formed an odd couple,

Joining forces to make a quick buck.

When the skunk balked, the fox didn’t scruple,

When the fox held back, the skunk ran amok;

When the skunk was cold, the fox was hot;

When the skunk was bold, the fox was yellow;

When the fox was ready, the skunk was not;

When the fox was firm, the skunk was jello.

But each night when the farmer fell asleep

And the watchdog dreamed of a great big bone,

They milked all the cows and fleeced all the sheep,

And harvested crops that others had sown.

As birds love worms and bees love honey,

This couple loves nothing more than money.

Navigation

Chastened by clouds of indifference,
he plotted a course based on idiosyncrasy.
He had nothing going for him
except the true north of doubt,
which always guided him
faithfully, like a compass.
The perfection of the circles in which he moved
was compensation enough.
Or so he told himself
as he stood stoically at the wheel,
coming around to where he was before.
He, not the stars, which never shone,
nor the graybeards who taught navigation,
was the captain of his fate.
He alone, always alone,
was the only one taking deep breaths,
thankful for the billows, relishing the isolation,
knowing that the meaning of the voyage
was not the destination, no,
but the deep satisfaction of not getting there.
Sailing in perfect circles was as close
to heaven as he ever wanted to get.

News item: Yale U. Press decides not to publish controversial Danish cartoons after all.

Et tu Yale,

Lux et Veritas?

Light fail,

Truth embarrass?

Dementia

He could not have predicted, not in a million years,
What his mind would be like at seventy-five,
Those billions of seconds of stored up,
Long forgotten impressions and memory traces
Being obliterated forever, being replaced
By a feeling of preternatural understanding,
And compassion, the precious gift of detachment
And insight into those stages of staged life,
Or so it seems now, the actors, blood brothers,
Including the younger one slipping into dementia,
And the accompanying cast of characters,
Whose roles were written before the big bang,
And were doomed to fall into the black holes
And to love the children of those mismatches
Immeasurably and guiltily, as slippers
Become more comfortable than sneakers
And eternity leaks like gold dust out of the head
Of the straw man who does the old soft shoe
While the usher shows you to your seat
Just as the screen goes belatedly, blessedly blank.

Teaching Composition
for Mina Shaughnessy (1927-1978)

The hell of teaching composition drives me to tropes.
The semester crawls in the boondocks, in the Bronx it gropes.
Open Enrollments, writhing across the curriculum,
is a problem everyone’s trying to flee from.
She found herself one night crying in the breakdown lane,
wishing she could somehow sublimate her pain
into something artistic, like macramé or verse.
She could not help being a clotheshorse
or, worse, Mother Teresa in a mink.
She enjoyed an occasional drink,
a Manhattan, with a dash of bitters.
She even had a crush on several Yankee hitters.
But she was born to suffer, to go down fighting,
on the via dolorosa of Basic Writing.
An ABD, near the bottom of the list,
she was patronized as a “compositionist.”
To the mystery of life, she found no answer;
she died childless, at fifty, of ovarian cancer.
Like Christ, the Word made flesh, son of the Boss,
she was, curricularly, nailed to the cross.
She wrote in God’s bluebook, in blood, “Not clear!”
She was the woman. She suffered. She was there.

Robert Forrey