PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I woke to an early alarm clock, and for a moment almost imagined I was at home; but the reality of my situation was not as amenable to my unspoken desire.

My roommate and I were, almost immediately, able to find the solid ground of common agreement---that we intensely disliked each other, and no amount of conversation or exchange would resolve that.  He despised me for my obvious sadness at being apart from my Beloved; and I found his contempt for poetry, music, and anything other than football, offensive and disturbing.

The morning provided two mandatory meetings: the freshman orientation group to which I had been assigned; and the dormitory wing in which I resided.  The information conveyed seemed meant to remind me, with rude directness, that I was no longer at home, no longer connected by any means to the community that had given me nurture, and liberation from the shadows of Lloyd and Betty; the community who, against the example of Lloyd and Betty, had welcomed, sustained, and encouraged Starwatcher.

The bucolic beauty of the campus presented a rather poetic contrast to the sense of isolation that I felt so intenselyt, already.  I also noticed, rather rapidly, that in this rural splendor, quite a few of my freshman class, and also of the returning upperclassmen who were beginning to move into their residences, were inclined (during this end of summer and beginning of autumn which would be warmed by record-setting temperatures) to dispense with the use of shoes.  Some barefoot, some flaunting beautifully patterned socks, and all clad in the many styles of jeans available during the mid-seventies:  this behavior, to my great gratitude, was not restricted to freshman orientation week, but woujld present itself daily until the cooling of mid-November, and the late autumn rains began.

The next shock of delight was provided by the library, which was already open and operational. I had never before visited a college library; I had never looked upon so many shelves, on four floors, of books.  The poetry and astronomy sections were inexplicably housed in the basement of the library, which would become, during my entire undergraduate years, a sort of second home to me.  I was pleased, at that time, to discover that one full wall of shelving was covered by the complete works, poetry and prose, of John Milton---and dozens upon dozens of nmonographs about that work.

I checked my very first book out of that library on that day:  Tom Cullen's superb monograph, When London Walked In Terror, which is still, to my mind, the finest study of the serial murders of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London, England.  Although scheduled to attend a reception for potential majors in the English Department, attendance required, in the early evening, I intended to spend the night's later hours---which would have been given to my Beloved, were I at home---reading a full accouint of the five "canonical" muirders, for the first time in my life.

For the previous two months, my Friday and Saturday nights, spent with my Beloved, had followed a distinctive pattern:  at dusk, we traveled on westbound I70 to a drive in theater called the Melody 49, to watch horror movies, or "B" movies; followed by pizza at a rather elegant venue called The Pub (sit-down dining, with even an extensive salad bar), followed by several hours of slow driving on the backroads around our rural village, so that we could talk on our c.b., which was a mobile unit, neither one of us having the base units used in homes.  Except duiring our meal at the Pub, my Beloved preferred shoelessness (flaunting midnight blue socks beneath the frayed cuffs of denim bell-bottoms) with the shirt of the day frontally unbuttoned, and the flaps drawn apart teasingly.  To this day, forty-five years later, I can still imagine, recollectively, the gently erotic fragranc of those socks and the beauty of soft and warm thoracic skin, bared beneath the cloudless, star-laden summer sky.  Now, separated from this by over fifty miles, unable to return to it without my parents consent to bring me back (which I had already been informed would not be given during my first term), I felt an incredible sense of loss, isolation, and solitude---a perfect setting in which to read Tom Cullen's masterful, detailed, and utterly chilling account of the Ripper murders.

Starward