Sarah Lawrence College - Yearbook (Bronxville, NY)

Page 80 text:

CHILD IN APRIL Small boy at a soda counter Virgin Mary face, a holy pattern The waves of your hair are golden foil Your lips are faded violet satin. Small boy of the candy ages In the pink of your face your sex is lost, A silver spoon anoints your lips, At this colored counter you accept the ice hcst. O small boy of the solemn morning ritual face Progenitor of life, still in potency Your image genuflects in the marble counter There, your years are rising slowly. Small boy of the gaping, mirrored world Pink Calliopic heart, moss of a quiet womb — Look, look you into the rim of today And tell me the fate of the month of May.

Page 79 text:

THREE POEMS BY JOSEPH PAPALEO WHILE ANTICIPATING SPRING I thought I heard the crickets In the winter in the city, Looking into glazed windows of apartment houses, Gaudy like red buttons on a prostitute's dress— What vain jewel stains on the nape of the night. I thought I heard the crickets In the shadows of the streetlight, As I passed the sides of hydrants In the city's steel thickets Of loneliness and evening, sight Of a rusty can, of a cavernous gutter. I thought I felt the wind abide About the tremulous trees. Growing through concrete tenuously, Blooming with agony in a thin attempt to please Or pacify the people in the street. I thought I heard the crickets In the winter in the city, In the spigot-happiness of short-lived Bright days, the gentle haughtiness Of slender tree boughs bowing to A fickle wind. Page sevenly-five

Page 81 text:

DUTY Mrs. Meemow, always in black goes to all funerals as men go to feasts; bursting with buttoned emotions and crying impassioned devotion. Children or women or men, long as they're dead and then—over the coffin she weaves, (hark to the carrion flesh)—puffing a tear like a penny balloon, talking and crying a popular tune, crass as the flowers, cross-like and wreathed, lying about the coffin so life-like. Ah, for the days of the dead and the funerals, ah, for the church and the masses she read in a white handkerchief with a black lining, wet and saline with the tears that she shed. Presenting emotions in proper black boxes, surrounding the mourners with sympathy broth, and gifts that are old, worn and stale smelling, gifts that are used and re-used for each outing. Oh, for the parties that death sets before us mingled with wetness and followed by dinner, talking talking of days that have gone, weaving the patterns we wrapped in the attic, removed and observed again — once more, always the good days that were before. Ah, Mrs. Meemow, dressed in your costume black as the coal that you stoke in the fire of life, and rococo emotions you carry,— your pendant; simple and quiet your book read in latin. Kissing the pictures and kneeling and bowing, beating your breast, not allowing the heavens to see that you missed with your duty to kneel at the coffin and cry on the mourners. Floating in black with your prayerbook flying, circled in gossamer faith all the time.—assisting, impairing the flight of the souls, up to the gates or down to the devil, how- ever the soul is want to be taken, however carelessly the music is played, always a prayer and always a coffin and always the feasts of emotions; long conversations add spice to the evenings, long and forever the jobs of the aids of the saints. Page seventy-seven