fate calls sadly

                       










                       Notes Toward a 25th Reunion

















“And what do you do?” Mrs. Appoplex,
Fat dam of some dim Story Street savant
In baggy Marimekko muumuu and
Barbaric Inca necklet, asks my wife
At some dream sherry party packed with ham-
Strung academics swaying gently in
The wind of Babel. “Why, just cook and fuck,”
My wife does not, so sweetly, tender in
Reply, although I wish like hell she would.
Whose world is real, for Christ’s sake, anyway?
Their sculpture gallery of images
That move mechanically in circumscribed
Tangents and – this is a recording – talk
In selfsame selfsongs all the livelong day?
(I must say I have just enough of a
Foot in that world to see its tiny point
Flash in the haystack of irrelevance.)
Or my free-form theatre of absurd,
Unaugurable happenstance, in which -
For gain, my lads, for gain – we businessmen
Risk all upon a nutty and divine
Idea of weal and on our con-man’s skill
To sell it to each other, I’ll back that
Frail matchstick pyramid of barest will,
On which to balance, one exposes all
To the black, hithering eye of the abyss,
As realer than the static autoclave
Of academe, full of blunt instruments
Becoming sterile as they sit and steam.
And yet, when I return in steaming June
To my Reunion in the pullulant
Hive of the Yard, I’ll look with shuttering
Eyes on my unknown classmates, businessmen
Who have no business with me, and greet
The likes of Mrs. Appoplex and her
Effete levée with a glad, homing cry.
The question is, what kind of fool am I?






                                                L.E.  Sissman