Show Me the Place, 26

“Show me the place.”

Duke Senior in As You Like It (2.1)

Satterfield Hall; Kent State University; Summer Session, 1969

I thought I’d take a summer class*—

A master’s sounded like a plan.

It was a kind of boarding pass—

I’d do the work—become The Man!

I noticed her right from the start—

So bright, attractive—every way.

But came a message from my heart:

“You have no hope—no, not a ray.”

And so I did not speak to her—

Why break my heart in hopelessness?

But then a wonder did occur:
She spoke to me! And I confess

That’s been the wonder of my life—

That day that Joyce first spoke to me.

For decades now she’s been my wife—

And now I curse mortality.

*American Transcendentalism, taught by Prof. Kenneth Pringle; it was a class neither Joyce nor I wanted to take—our first choices (not the same) were full.