Summer School at Saint Francis

The young priest with an Irish smile
Reveals the Lord in the auditorium—
With such glib, learned cheer, why not convert and join the fun?
The young Notre Dame football star with close-cropped neat blonde hair and well-scrubbed nails talks confidently and intimately of the soul, explains matter-of-factly, with a condescending grin, how things are, what God wants, how to go about it.
Always smiling—life, death, a bit of hand—slapping in purgatory and you’re in; you can’t lose!
God will win from the fifty yard line
If the devil doesn’t concede first.


What shall the bulletin board bring today?
New lettering? new colors? new pins and papers?
Will it tell us “Books Bring Happiness?”
Or “A Rich Vocabulary Is the Key to Understanding?”
Or introduce us to “Prefixes and Suffixes ?“
Or will it tell us only to “Get Hooked on Reading” like the black and white polkadot paper bloated fish about to take the black yarn and bent-nail hook from his green cork ocean?
Do kindergarten teachers love children?

Long sits this vast room of empty chairs,
Rows and rows and ranks and files, quiet, benign, a cemetary of thoughts.
On the stage no speaker strides; from the lectern comes no words;
The silent grand piano looks absurd.
In this room are many ghosts;
Dim the lights and know them.


In the AV aide charges,
Limps to the rear bearing a microphone stand,
whips a key, unlocks a door,
bursts forth behind a juggernaut projector and charges out
Soon another door opens;
In charges Gimpy dragging two old chairs to the stage,
Slams them down, shoves the lectern,
Pounds a microphone onto the stand,
And heaves an overhead projector out the door—
His asymmetrical steps fade down the hall.

Trailing down from Bonaventure to the plains,
Across the Globe-studded weedpatch that was a lake,
Onward and upward past Our Mother,
Stepping smartly aside B & G trucks and tractors,
Striding down the mall to the Troub, past the library, past the birds, past the trees, benches, lawn chairs and shade,
Past the smiling, swishing, mellow pale sisters,
Past the smiling, swashing, nervous tan novitiates,
Striding down the mall to the Troub,
From the tower of knowledge to the pit of snackland,
Where study is out and smailtalk is in.


There are four nuns.
One is pretty.
What’ s a nice young nun like you doing in a place like this?
A man trips by and jostles her chair--the excusing, the smiles--
Does she really belong to God?


Doctor Essix presents a problem:
the lack of spirituality in modern life, the paralysis of everyone to correct it, the wasteland that is today, the stoic stance that endures all, somehow.
It’s all so clear, so lucid, so incontrovertible-—and what can be done about it, after all?
Well, first, we can study the background material surrounding the literature (we have collected tons of clippings, snapshots, and letters over the years),
Then we can interpret the literature
(asking the students first, of course, and enduring their naive obser­vations which don’t even correspond to our notes),
Explain to the students what the author didn’t realize that he said.

Then, what else? We’ll have a test Friday
to see how well the parrots mimic our notes,
to see if they, too, have grasped the essence of the literature. Ah, literature! It’s too sublime,
too sublime for words.
But alas! it must be intellectualized
(that’s where we come in—to make it intelligible to the students).
Thank God! we’ve found our calling.
We can’t write it, but we can teach it.
We have a most impressive set of notes, books, criticism, secondary materials—everything needed to counter the most troublesome remarks they may ignorantly insist upon.
The students are getting more troublesome each term, it seems.
Mi, well, we try.
If they won’t have it, so much the pity.
-

Vroom! down the hall
Whish! down the stairs
Nudge through the jam of wide-bottomed elementary teachers toward the parking lot’s single exit,
Smiling through windshields, we grit our teeth and curse softly and coast a bit further, jockeying for takeoff;
Mature grad students, we.

Most of the ladies are fat, middle-class teachers
who smile a lot, nod a lot, and understand little.
The professor must couch his terms carefully so as not to offend. They block my thought even as they block my aisle at class’s end.

Sitting in the eternal classroom, the air conditioner faltering,
The professor droning, the chair hardening,
The fluorescent lights brightening, the Brownies piping,
The students sweating, the art class upstairs pounding,
The brain numbing, the ignorant stalling,
The guts churning, the eyes aching,
Learning are we of truth, life, the need for love.


Bonaventure is a pleasant enough place,
clean, modern, air-conditioned,
with a touch of the old in its uneven roofline and rounded, warm corners.

The corridors are nice, if bare—pa stel—And the third floor art hail is a showcase,
with a painting by Elizabeth Barrett and a towering heap of nuts,
bolts, and brads outstanding in my mind—
Altogether a sz~tisfactory setting for an outrageous experiment in humanity. But alas, the education is the same as elsewhere: an interminable lesson
in turning off—Academe.
Academe in the rooms, polluting the air, betraying the architecture, obscuring the people, crushing the inspiration and the delight, killing the promise.

Poor Mrs. Murders all,
Sweet as a puppy, fat as a hog,
Clucks like a hen, walks like a wren,
Studies like a bear, stacks up her hair,
Nice as could be, personality—
but fat as a hog.


Nadya the Egyptian and her occidental blonde twin-­I can see their profiles down the front row,
Their hair streaming down over the lithe backs—
Beautiful, feminine, lovely—
Their small chiseled features smooth as desert drifts, subtle, delineated,
Their large eyes see just so, just so.
They are so thin, so antique, so faraway—
The lyre and the auios-­One dark, one light~ the day, the night; complete.

Spiller,
Dapper little dandy,
Intense little eyes and curlywavy hair,
You’re a cracker, Spilier-diller, but the curse touches you also:
you’re too short.
You teach art; I write;
But we’re still short, aren’t we?
Too short for engineers, firemen or chiefs,
Too short to be honest, without our art to hide behind.
Move quick, make a name, run fast-­maybe no one will notice.

The Personnel Office looks like a bank office—a blank office with a cardboard secretary
and a recording for a loan clerk to fend off the poor with a sincere smile
The big boss is never in—“He’s on vacation just now, but if you care to try later—“

One day on Bonaventure’s third floor
As we discussed Browning’s doctrine of love, All of a sudden the building trembled—
through the concrete one could feel the tension.
Why, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the whole pile didn’t tumble at any moment, cave in to a yawning chasm and disappear forever—
Why, the air conditioner even slowed for a moment! it was terrifying, simply terrifying,
Till I remembered the steel girders and beams, the glass and sturdy brick, and the modern, efficient design.

Mister Bradburn is five feet tall.
He is going to quit teaching in the fall
and go to work for an encyclopedia firm of long standing. He walks with a lilt, has never a tilt—good for you, Mr. Bradburn; go write em, boy!
He’s been everywhere—all over Europe, too,
and he knows all about it.

He is the inscrutable, honorable professor of modern China.
His moustasche is Chinese, his eyes slant, and he is very handsome.
He understands China.
He plays around with a first-rate, long-haired beauty who’s studying art; he’s been trying to put the make on her for about a month now, in between fooling with an older teacher with a well-preserved figure.
Today he dragged the chic young student down to the Troub, and couldn’t find a seat for their coffee, so he had to share her with some other horny students; he was squelched.
But he bore it with Chinese stoicism.
More power to you, Chaing; I envy you your goal (and proximity, apparently, to success!)
Long live the Republic of China and its secrets,
and may your children know their parents.

Giggle along with Giggles Keho
Giggle along some more.
Giggle along till you nearly gag
With giggles and gaggles galore—
Oh, there’s Miss Ifney now! Halloo, Miss Ifney! how’s your stiff knee?
Where have you been?
we’ve missed you greatly,
Hasn’t been the same since you ye gone.
Top drawer, Miss Ifney-­the door, Miss Ifney?
so sorry, so sad, forlorn.

Jack Sprat’s another.
He’s found his cloister at St. Francis.
His wife’s to support him while he gets his Masters’
Then his mother.


Miss Bernbaum dresses pertly, winces a lot, and moves in high heels, And under it all she is mad and bites her nails.
She doesn’t find her spirit here—most vexing.

Mr. Buber, really—
You shouldn’t think such thoughts, and if you did, you shouldn’t show them, Mr. Buber.
People talk about your walk.
Control, Mr. Buber, control.


They’re building a new science building,
And for the life of me I can’t see how they’re going to get to it unless they walk across the lake
(of course, at Saint Francis anything is possible).
It has a dome on top—I thought it would be an observatory, but it’s all cement.
You wouldn’t want a cement dome on an observatory, would you? Perhaps it’s a planetarium.
Things are, after all, rather self-contained here....