A Latin Elective, Brooklyn College, 1968
While our knees pistoned
for Professor Kaplan to hand out
the passages we’d have to translate
for our final exam, Eleanor mumbled,
“Latin’s a dead language, as dead
as it can be; first it killed the Romans,
and now it’s killing me.”
Maybe it was hilarious, maybe
I was just nervous, but I laughed
‘til tears etched my cheeks
like the Styx—that river of Hell—
that Aeneas trembled to cross.
Or maybe, the scared laughter
of the dirty jungle war lurking
in my not-too-distant future,
the war that was the only news
on the radio, TV, or in the papers,
the only thing we talked about
in the college cafeteria
or thought of in the library
while studying declensions
and conjugations, or scratched
my head over sentences as alien
to my “fuhgeddaboutit”
Brooklynese as the language
our enemies spoke in rage,
love, and terror.
Reading The Rolling Stone
Over a pizza lunch,
I study this list of Dylan’s
70 greatest songs,
on his 70th birthday,
the way I once
scrutinized box scores,
as if searching for
ultimate truth
in the homers Mays hit,
Koufax’s strikeout count,
or the number of yards
Jim Brown rushed for.
As I read,
I keep telling myself
all lists are put out by people
with nothing better to do.
Still, it rankles
when so few of my favorites
have made the cut.
Where’s “Senor”?
I want to shout, but
there are too many pizza
feasters itching for violence
over a hockey game re-run.
So I bite, chew, swallow,
read, and mutter curses
at the general stupidity
of everyone, but myself.
Robert Cooperman’s latest collection is THE DEVIL WHO RAISED ME (Lithic Press). Also recently published is THAT SUMMER (Main Street Rag Publishing Co.) IN THE COLORADO GOLD FEVER MOUNTAINS (Western Reflections Books) won the Colorado Book Award for Poetry.
Academy of the Heart And Mind 