friday refrain (from a former professor)
Friday 29 September 2006 | I like a cookie
SUMMER 1983 — Mary Jo Salter
None of us remembers these, the days
when passing strangers adored us at first sight,
just for living, or for rolling down the street;
praised all our given names; begged us to smile…
You, too, in a little while,
my darling, will have lost all this,
asked for a kiss will give one, and learn
how love dooms us to earn
love once we can speak of it.
•
[In one of those life-is-film twists that strains credulity, the Republican had pinned this poem to his door at the Great Books College, copied out of the New Republic onto college-ruled notebook paper. I didn’t yet know him when I stood in the hallway one afternoon reading it, admiring the inevitability of its final lines, never guessing that in 7 years I’d write my undergrad thesis—Boxes of Light!—under Ms. Salter’s formidable formalist tutelage.]
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