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.