Old poem from Way Stations. (note : "pass the torch to those who follow" - line from my high school's official song. Same high school poet Allen Grossman attended 20 yrs earlier - another poet obsessed with poet's "vocation", poetry's social authority or sanction. (cf. his remarkable essay in latest Chicago Review.))

  
  
 MEMORIAL DAY

  
 It is no longer in my power
 To pass the torch to those who follow.
 Long ago I fell away from the steel
 Fiber holding up the school gymnasium,
 And years have obscured the clear
 Path I walked, a serious child,
 By the dreamy lawns, the sheltering
 Oak trees of the suburbs.  Shame
 Weighs on me, tugs at my pride:
 My tongue grows awkward, inarticulate,
 Unable to confess in clever numbers
 All the grotesqueries this antic mind
 Would indulge - my soul, snagged
 In a filmy web, in the seamy afterlife
 Of manifest destiny, that central pomp
 Of high-riding families, magnified
 On the national screen.  An irony
 Hovered with dark wings over the slow
 River of my growing, marking a sign
 On the brow of the elder son.

      
     Thus
 We plant our feet on the boards,
 And pretend a scene.  But every word
 Tingles with guile; the simple form
 Of the body recites from memory
 A better tale - more harsh, more
 Innocent, exemplary.  To be born -
 To be thrown off-center - the rest
 Is only lust, or circumcision -
 And perhaps a morning breeze, echo
 And reconciliation.

        
                  Enter Hamlet, reading.

    
            Pray God, your voice, like a piece
            of uncurrent gold, be not cracked
            within the ring.

  
 The envious ghost burns for his
 Possessions - rattling armor there
 On the far side of the battlements,
 In the outer dark.  Gertrude?
 Ophelia?  I remember Memorial Day,
 Gathering families in the clear
 Green stillness of the huge park -
 And my brothers scampering, acting up,
 Waving their tiny stars and stripes.
 As in a grainy home movie, I can see
 My meek father hovering over the grill;
 Granddad motionless, his hearing aid
 Turned off; and Grandma and my mother,
 Laughing, bustling around, two bird voices
 Diving into the water, where a bronze
 Hiawatha carries Minnehaha carefully
 Across the muttering stream...

      
                        5.30.86