Ithaka to the New World

 Avowal

Joyfully and happily without pride

That girl who’d be your second bride

Softly wed upon green hills,

Their contours mapped by stones and rills,

There where El Dorado shimmered

With golden dreams deceived and glimmered

There where history magnetized

Populations unbaptized:

Heroes all, immortalized

By Westerns quaintly synthesized:

Chinese adventurers, sojourner Jews,

Suppliers, Assayers, and Cowboy hopefuls too,

New-minted miners, Forty-niners,

Illustrate the birth of a state;

Softly wed upon green hills

Gracing the base of a mountain range:

Its fiery beauty passing strange,

To one born on an emerald island

Where the stark drama of even the Highlands

Measures time by its slow creation:

Gentle erosion for a sometime genteel nation;

In that rain-swept land you grew apace:

At age eleven claiming your place

In a world first seen (and heard) at war,

Now freed from fear, if grinding poor.

A whiz in maths and ancient tongues,

You chose the living path, the one

Giving you the chance to speak

Of humankind in Ancient Greek;

Scholarship boy, mother’s pride and joy,

And father’s too, never doubt it,

Though he understood but little about it.

In that rain-swept land you grew apace.

In London ran your early race,

Then Cambridge-bound you found your idyll

Your Camelot, your glory tribal,

Ancient knighthood devoted to books

Taught by men of piercing looks,

There a band of brothers, and a few sisters, too,

In knowledge and affection grew.

King’s College, unique of its kind,

Chose you among others,

Eight centuries of brothers,

Time out of mind;                                                                                 

Among scholars protected by the princely race,

Among myriad Etonians who took their place;

Then lords’ and merchants’ sons, Hungarians,

Poles enrolled; and before other colleges

Integrated,

Kingsmen from round the globe

Matriculated.

Now you received a second formation,

Intellect’s gestation, group identification;

From elders like F.R. Leavis, Edmund Leach

You and your cohort modeled your reach,

Distinguished from the majority,

Learning to question authority,

Amidst the ferment of creation

You underwent sub-speciation.

First described by Wilkinson

From a 20^th century sample,

Arrayed like a jolly cummerbund

Round starch-shirted virtues ample:

Traits such as tolerance proving salient

Matched originality’s steep-rise gradient;

Independent, liberal, unconventional,       

This species of man radiated potential.

(And even as early as 1972

This radiant species was one of woman, too.)

Surprisingly free of glories meretricious,

Bold, but only to a point ambitious;

Homo Regalis, glimpsed in writer E.M. Forester,

Displayed in musicians from Radcliffe to Gardiner,

All acquired a particular grace

Knowing they inhabited an exceptional place.

There not far from Londontown,

Sheltered by a chapel for gothic beauty renowned,

There Odysseus, that voyager soon to be,

Wed in all simplicity his clever Penelope,

And there might they have dwelt in comfort and peace,

Safely ensconced, to America’s East:

Free of the Beast. But for Mad Margaret’s benighted quest:

To stunt the formation of the brightest and the best.

In the name of Holy Capital did Maggie quell

Factory whistle, tower bell.

Youths packing lunch pails, students toting books,

Beheld their futures’ brave new look.

An iconoclast destroying idols,

She revoked positions to Learning entitled.

Misprizing princely obligation

To cultivate State education,

She rent the ancient charter

As wind dispersing water.

Insane or just inane, Thatcher triggered a brain drain.

Bereft of the second home with which he’d been blessed,

It was time for Odysseus to Go West.

Go West, as the disco song commands,

Go West, quoth the New England newspaperman,

Quoth Horace Greeley to American

Youth: Go West Young Man,

Quoth the namesake, forsooth,

Of Roman virtue uncompromising,

To Duty forsworn,

Love’s claims all misprizing.

Horace et les Curiaces: in a contest surprising,

He vanquished all three, the forbearer of Roman liberty.

A hero without question, his glory bore a cost;

Founder, soldier, patriot, a part of his soul was lost,

Did ghostly Horace, marching in step with the years,

Regret he failed to yield to his sister’s tears?

Go West: such simple advice it seems

Prompted by ambition or dreams:

“Together we will love the beach,

Together we will learn and teach.”

But our Odysseus traveled alone,

With his own Athena, and his own Poseidon.

Poseidon drove Odysseus from the shores of home,

Denying him comforts of the familiar, the known.

His Athena – always the stronger of the two godheads –

Lent him fortitude to outmatch dread.

She led him across the dark blue sea,

To the West, to the future, to victory,

And taking him softly by the hand,

Whispered kind memories of his native land.

Soon in California, Land of Sun,

Where pleasure beckoned: endless fun,

Good wine at dinner, a morning run,

And always the proximity

Of the turquoise, the sapphire, the lazuli sea.

Always too, from morning to night,

Graced by the white California light,

The sense of forever as time unfurled,

Full of tomorrows, on the Rim of the World.

Amidst such bedazzling, such brilliance on parade,

Your rain-swept homeland might have begun to fade,

But that your Athena filled your memory’s senses

With robust realities– no vague pretenses –

With indelible images of hedges, barges, pebbled beaches,

Parish churches and stately speeches,

Timber-framed dreams and hammer beams,

Mussels alive and Fleet Street’s noisy hive.

Now at  UC Berkeley in a teaching position,

Time to make a lifestyle decision.

Neither exclusively Brit nor Yankee,

Ni l’un ni l’autre, a mixture, but free:

What kind of ex-pat would you be?

Go rogue? Go bush? Go home for crumpets and tea?

Dilemma if it was, you solved it like the rest.

Keeping your cards close to your chest,

Never abandoning the sacred flame,

You played the tourist, an adventurer’s game.

Soon you played the tour guide too,

Friends you took to Yosemite, Death Valley, Mokelumne Hill,

To Inverness and Napa and Sutter’s Mill.

Journeys by the score you made,

All the while observing history’s parade.

But what of that girl, your second bride,

What did she joyfully, and without pride?

I swear that story of a passion true

Is yet to come, at last to you.

Your bride awaits, she is waiting for you still

In that place atop the winter-green hill.