Sod

I was shocked when it happened. One day, out of the blue, I was sitting under a tree on the South Lawn at Columbia College in Spanish Harlem, reading the poem “Daffodils” by Wordsworth.

And seconds later I knew who I was. I had to write poetry. There was no fudging. It wasn’t business reports, which would have pleased my father.

I didn’t want to be a pianist, maybe because my father had removed the piano from our house, after one too many Beethoven sonatas. I had never had a lesson, and I took it for granted that I could sight-read concerti and memorize them as I played them.

I didn’t have any examples around me of poets or pianists that I knew.

It was obvious to me that my one mentor, the pedagogue Russell Sherman, didn’t bother to understand what I thought was a wonderful poem, “Second Childhood,” that I wrote at John Jay Hall at Columbia in the late ‘70s.

I grew up in a very bizarre family in which the men were distracted and absentminded (their father having run away), and the women were harpies who seem to have married to acquire dead Dutch relatives and pedigrees.

I spent my life in my room, provided for me by my grandfather (he’d given the house to my mother as wedding present), filled with books and my writing. But around me in the family houses raged a competition: who could be found to discredit most effectively anything I did.

One aunt was convinced I was a deviant trying to deflower her daughter, the other found various hack poets to say my poetry wasn’t worthy of support and I should be evicted by

my family. She actually said to my father, “Get rid of him.” At some point my inventor uncle decided I was a genius. Sadly, I never saw him again.

Jealousy was rampant among all my cousins. I was somehow a threat to their genes. Over the years, this jealousy took the form of sniveling obsequiousness or towering rages. All the Dickensian voices. When I played a Chopin Polonaise for Maria von Trapp, my aunt Helen snapped at me, “Don’t ever play that piece in public again.” The family was massed against me. I never let it get to me, although I’m astonished when I think back on it.

I played duets with my one warm and talented Irish aunt, Annie. Annie also wrote witty rhyming sagas that skewered our family. For some reason, I never showed anyone my poetry until Sherman and Cathy.

So Cathy’s belief in me flooded me with warmth, with identity. One person was on my side. When I told my aunt Tessie that we were getting married, she paused to summon up sufficient breath, and cursed us: “You’ll burn in hell!” My father said, “At least you’re not gay.”

I had dropped out of college during the 1968 riots and gone to Boston, where I ended up studying with Sherman. But I had nightmares about not knowing the answers to biology exams, and, to exorcise them, I put everything I owned in storage at my aunt Tessie’s house on the Bedford Green an hour north of New York City, and moved into a dorm at Columbia which had been loosely converted from a former brothel.

I drove a cab and tutored Barnard girls, lived on Hamburger Helper without the hamburger, and one day under the only tree on campus (at least I never noticed any others, except the city trees set into the sidewalks), I was like Saul, struck by lightning.

This was the lawn which in ‘68 had mounted police galloping like Cossacks down on students, and which this month is overwhelmed with the tents of protesters. I haven’t noticed the tree since it spoke to me. Its work was done, its blossom me.

I don’t remember the weather, or anything else that happened that week. I remember the future, decided under that tree.