I Wandered Like A Tear Gas Cloud.

Fall always makes me think of school. Not public school, which was compulsory and boring. The only thing that reminds me of that is waiting in line at the Motor Vehicle Bureau. No, crisp mornings, changing leaves and the smell of wood smoke mean college to me. Tweed jackets, plaid skirts and long, woolen scarves in school colors. Lambent shadows upon gothic buildings with dreaming spires and, most of all, walking to classes amid the pied beauty of autumn in New England. Those aren’t my memories, but I prefer them. At best, they're a mash-up of Wellesley College and Brideshead Revisited. I went to Boston University, which is splayed out like a nervous system around the streetcar line that zips, like electrical messages, up the spinal cord of Commonwealth Avenue. No quaint customs about walking around the lake or sherry at the High Table there, I’ll be bound. The campus was anchored at one end by my dormitory, a cinder-block structure with steel furniture bolted to the floor, the only amenity being a phone – with cord – mounted, firmly, on the wall of your room and at the other by that clogged drain, since gentrified, known as Kenmore Square. My classes took place in a former commercial building, probably an auto showroom. Again, renovated without amenities. The business end of those classes, however, was vastly more gratifying.

I spent my freshman and sophomore years in very small study groups, interdisciplinary in nature and under the ministrations of brilliant, tenured professors. There were no grades and their attendant pressures and a common library, so you didn’t have to buy books. Alas, that program is long gone due to a scheming university president, who taught Richard III by example. Not that it was an academic paradise, it wasn’t. In fact, I wonder how gratifying it was for the professors. I gave most of my classes about one-tenth of the attention they deserved. Had I given them more, I might have invented blogs instead of jumping on the bandwagon precisely at the moment that the wheels fall off. One thing that did engage me, not completely, but more than my studies, was the protest movement – mostly anti-war, but it covered a multitude of sins. I wasn’t in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society, but you knew that. Right?) but I marched. Not only was it the right thing to do, but it was exciting and a little bit dangerous (more or less the way I feel about bacon and eggs today.) Recollecting those emotions in tranquility (also known as unemployment or waiting to be published) I have written a poem that, now that I look at it, bears more than a slight resemblance to “Daffodils” by William Wordsworth. I reproduce it below:

I wandered like a tear gas cloud

That floats on high o’er college quad,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of the Riot Squad;

Beside the river, beneath the trees,

Stalwart and grimacing in the breeze.

Continuous as the buttons that shine

Upon a policeman’s chest,

They stretched in never-ending line,

Poised to make arrests:

Ten thousand saw I at a glance,

Swinging their clubs in a baleful dance.

The angry students start to march; attacked,

The frightened marchers flee:

A poet never could be gay,

In such beleaguered company.

I gazed – and gazed – but little thought

That, merely watching, I’d be caught

For oft, when in my cell I lie

In vacant or in pensive mood,

They flashback on that inner eye

Which is the bane of solitude;

And before my head can nod

I rise and curse the Riot Squad.