Vassar


Here, at this college I did not attend,
wisdom in friendship walks the quad arched
by a giant sycamore and Dodona’s oaks.
Few leaves now cling to any branches,
though if green songs fluttered in green air
the giant sycamore’s giant arm
would by its perpendicular power
show that strength of mind, like Truth,
endures vicissitude with help from the heart,
as cables in lines like cobwebs
assist its mighty perpendicular reach.

Have I not climbed along its outstretched arm
before today, just as I do now,
shinnying my body out to its fingertips
which hold me over the lawns and paths
and out beyond the quad, beyond Raymond Avenue,
beyond the banks of the Hudson, where I flow
down to my renowned uncle’s Sunnyside
and thence to kind and cruel Atlantic crests?

Here, at this college I did not attend,
I climb along branches of mind
I learned in the there of my Kenyon past
and feel, through the angled light
breaking into Adam’s Main Building room,
that there and here are somehow one
invisibly cobwebbed space, if space at all,
as my walk along the sycamore’s great arm
is now and then beyond the reach
of what we like to say is time but know
cannot be told or shaped or rhymed.



John Kryder


Poems