George And Me

My life lies splayed out across the years In serpentine course through town and city I need an old friend to prod the memory-snake And let me feel it stretch into the past. The tail goes back to industrial suburbs And a sad-eyed boy Who studied the scenery on the wartime stage And escaped being inducted into the sound and fury; Then the story bends toward a college town Where he missed some friends that fate appointed Being rapt in imagining the hearts of others Inside the many marks he learned on paper; Then it makes its way to a Far-East sojourn Tilting at windmills of someone else's culture Hitting the wall of Third World awakening; Then making a loop to the Midwest To weather the storm he brought back with him; Then lost windings homeward, coast to coast One coil always wrapped tenderly around a child Many convolutions abysmally submerged. Finally it climbs out, shakes off the flute-song of ancient books Winding schoolward again to study its own land's culture Allowed to crawl into a classroom, to teach ‘Freshman Composition' Which is how it ran into George. George: quick-witted student and instant pal You kept our class alive, Late-met friend to remedy my lonesome youth You stood out like a ‘Bud' sign in a dim tavern; Nothing was serious or simple to you And the rest of that Warren rat-pack From the favored heights of rusty Youngstown, But you were good-hearted and tough-minded. Your remarks were cloud-enclosed captions In a comic book co-written by God and Satan; You played your thoughts on heavenly piano (no talk of your tormented fingers) . When my marriage exploded, you and Dave Kelly Let me and my daughter move into Animal House; You taught her duets and Beatles tunes She guarded Dave's keys so he wouldn't drive drunk. Three wild undergrads and a grad-student father Kept house with a sweet-tempered first grader. Of course our household scattered soon I went to work in Philadelphia, then on to China; You went to law school, then on to New York Piles of letters have passed between us As I continued my wandering ways And you served, and made a life for yourself As Public Defender at a courthouse in the Bronx. Now you're getting prickly and hard-bitten Still you're best for sharing thoughts and poetry. That's why I don't need this moment's tyranny And I think of George, to touch the memory-snake To help me keep what's mine from twenty years back, To nudge the long body of memory So I can know the road I came on And own it every inch of the way. I am more than these sensations through beady eyes Sidling up distractedly to flowers and grasses To flicker my tongue at the wind is not enough A friend helps me live in the snake-body of my whole life. ......... Notes: BUD is an abbreviation for BUDWEISER beer. BUD is also short for "buddy." WARREN HEIGHTS is a semi-affluent suburb of Youngstown where families belonging to the professional class lived. Youngstown (in the mid-western Rust Belt)was hard-hit by the steel industry's decline. ANIMAL HOUSE was a movie starring John Belushi about a group of party-loving college students who shared a house.