Teachers' Dreams

In dreams begin responsibilities

for teachers as well as others. 

I would have been a teacher 

even if I had had my druthers.

But I fell into it, as we fall asleep.

I’m always unprepared,

in front of a flock of kids,

feeling like  a rabbit, snared,

or like a retarded Einstein

who’s never  won a game

of tic-tac-toe in his life,

a fool in the Hall of Shame,

a prof with a Ph.D.

in Elementary Dopiness

who was once granted

a sabbatical for hopelessness.

In my dreams, I mean,

not in what’s called real life,

in which I have a house,

a cat, and a supportive wife,

and prepare conscientiously

for each week’s classes

and have as my minimal goal 

that every student passes,

though for most of them

the baffling past participles 

are the equivalent, in physics,

of the mysterious tiny particles

that exist in force fields,

the most basic of which is gravity,

which is everywhere and nowhere,

like T.S. Eliot’s Macavity.

Teachers’ dreams anxiously reveal 

that we’re on treadmills,

or like the deluded Quixote, 

that we’re tilting at windmills. 

Still, we beat on, us teachers,

like boats against the currents,

against the tide of ignorance,

our own as well as the students’.

But we won’t give up, knowing

like Lear, that way lies madness,

so we embrace our sullen art

and its concomitant sadness.

It beats being a Babbitt,

or selling elevator shoes,

and in the final analysis,

what have we got to lose?

We’ve still got Shakespeare,

who succeeded without the university,

teaching us life’s most important lesson:

Sweet are the uses of adversity.

           Robert Forrey, 2016

My Two Alberts

The Alberts—not  Schweitzer or Einstein

But my two Alberts—lived up to the names

Of their illustrious namesakes just fine.

Not participating in American games— 

All of which involved solitary balls—

They preferred instead to play hide-and-seek

With truth—children ignoring their mothers’ calls,

Waiting for the mystery of night to speak. 

Into the heart of darkness they schlepped,

Time’s troubadours who had lost their way—

Time’s insomniacs, they only slept—

And that figuratively—during the day. 

But before retiring, they saw the light:

Relatively, night was day, day was night.

                                  Robert Forrey, 2012

Einstein: General Theory of Tic Tac Toe

Einstein pondering the problem

His personal life was in shambles.

His marriage was a mess.

“My mind, instead of racing, rambles,”

He wrote his Yiddish mistress.

He was hitting the laughing gas hard.

He wasn’t sleeping much either.

Inhaling N₂O  by  the yard

Was his idea of a breather.

He was being such a dumb cluck.

He was being such a schmo.

His mistress told him, “Such a schmuck!

Tic Tac Toe? What’s to know?”

Standing at the blackboard, he pondered

The covariant X’s and O’s.

When his mind wandered, he wondered

What, if anything, a schmuck knows.

But stubbornness was his dominant trait—

His sense of destiny his  mission.

He was willing to stand and wait,

To be faithful to his vision.

“Eureka!” he exclaimed one night.

It was better  than sex.

When he finally saw  the light,

It was N₂O =X+X+X.

                        Robert Forrey, 2010

Falling Asleep Over Isaacson's Einstein

“Oh, my! That Johnnie boy!

So crazy with desire.

While thinking of his Dollie

His pillow catches fire.”

(Verse the young Einstein wrote to his first wife,

Mileva, whom he, in time, was callously unfaithful to.)

In dreams begin not responsibility,

as Delmore Schwartz said, but roundness,

which, like gravity, was once

as hard to understand as relativity.

The wife, who watched her patent clerk sail

to the west, awoke to discover,

when he returned from the east,

the round earth flat, their home a jail:

sunlight squared is a whoreson,

equal to all the infidelity in the world.

The calculating clerk looked at figures,

understood curves and clocks are one,

understood, as scurvy is cured by lime,

the bias of space, the whirligig of time.

                            Robert Forrey, 2009