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Now reading
For Miss Lewis and Miss Newton
As you walked through the streets of Vienna-already a grey-beard
and weighed down by all the cares of family life-you might come
unexpectedly on some well-preserved elderly gentleman, and would
greet him humbly almost because you had recognized him as one of
your former schoolmasters. But afterwards, you would stop and reflect
"Was that really he? or only someone deceptively like him? How
youthful he looks! And how old you yourself have grown .. ."
These men became our substitute fathers. That was why, even though
they were still quite young, they struck us as so mature and so
unattainably adult.
Sigmund Freud
And our mothers: what it meant
to love them, to want to be loved
by them-those anonymous phone calls we made
just to hear them say "hello? hello?"
those afternoons we lurked a foot or two
beyond their classroom door
and looking in we saw them, beautiful, absorbed,
grading papers at the scratched oak desk!
Allie Lewis: Lexington Avenue, Central Park,
wherever I walked
I carried you in my head,
your halo of black hair, tender eyes...
Cornelia Newton: on Bleecker Street, Macdougal Street,
you haunted me,
your shabby leopard coat, wispy voice,
grey-blonde ringlets . . .
How youthful you look now,
and how old I've grown!
Adult as a briefcase, I'm carried
over the Rockies by TWA:
lines of snow
loop below me,
hieroglyphs in a white script
that's called maturity;
enormous trees shadow the dark trails
on the lost half of the cliff;
what's behind me now
was ahead of you then.
Yet your faces, traced in the massif,
still stare, stare up at me,
your high cheekbones glimmer,
your hair-yellow, black, gray-
changes its colors with the seasons.