As you were contained in Or embodied by Louise Schlossman When she was a sophomore At Walnut Hills High School In Cincinnati, Ohio, I salute you And thank you For the fact That she received My kisses with tolerance On New Year's Eve And was not taken aback As she well might have been Had she not had you And had I not, too. Ah, you! Dark, complicated you! Jewishness, you are the tray On it painted Moses, David and the Ten Commandments, the handwriting On the Wall, Daniel In the lions' den On which my childhood Was served By a mother And father Who took you To Michigan Oh the soft smell Of the pine Trees of Michigan And the gentle roar Of the Lake! Michigan Or sent you To Wisconsin I went to camp there On vacation, with me Every year! My counselors had you My fellow campers Had you and "Doc Ehrenreich" who Ran the camp had you We got up in the Mornings you were there You were in the canoes And on the baseball Diamond, everywhere around. At home, growing Taller, you Thrived, too. Louise had you And Charles had you And Jean had you And her sister Mary Had you We all had you And your Bible Full of stories That didn't apply Or didn't seem to apply In the soft spring air Or dancing, or sitting in the cars To anything we did. In "religious school" At the Isaac M. Wise Synagogue (called "temple") We studied not you But Judaism, the one who goes with you And is your guide, supposedly, Oddly separated From you, though there In the same building, you In us children, and it On the blackboards And in the books Bibles And books simplified From the Bible. How Like a Bible with shoulders Rabbi Seligmann is! You kept my parents and me Out of hotels near Crystal Lake In Michigan and you resulted, for me, In insults, At which I felt Chagrined but Was energized by you. You went with me Into the army, where One night in a foxhole On Leyte a fellow soldier Said Where are the fuckin Jews? Back in the PX. I d like to See one of those bastards Out here. I d kill him! I decided to conceal You, my you, anyway, for a while. Forgive me for that. At Harvard you Landed me in a room In Kirkland House With two other students Who had you. You Kept me out of the Harvard Clubs And by this time (I Was twenty-one) I found I preferred Kissing girls who didn t Have you. Blonde Hair, blue eyes, And Christianity (oddly enough) had an Aphrodisiac effect on me. And everything that opened Up to me, of poetry, of painting, of music, Of architecture in old cities Didn t have you I was Distressed Though I knew Those who had you Had hardly had the chance To build cathedrals Write secular epics (Like Orlando Furioso) Or paint Annunciations--"Well I had David in the wings." David Was a Jew, even a Hebrew. He wasn't Jewish. You're quite Something else. I had Mahler, Einstein, and Freud. I didn't Want those three (then). I wanted Shelley, Byron, Keats, Shakespeare, Mozart, Monet. I wanted Botticelli and Fra Angelico. "There you've Chosen some hard ones For me to connect to. But Why not admit that I Gave you the life Of the mind as a thing To aspire to? And Where did you go To find your 'freedom'? to New York, which was Full of me." I do know Your good qualities, at least Good things you did For me--when I was ten Years old, how you brought Judaism in, to give ceremony To everyday things, surprise and Symbolism and things beyond Understanding in the Synagogue then I Was excited by you, a rescuer Of me from the flatness of my life. But then the flatness got you And I let it keep you And, perhaps, of all things known, That was most ignorant. "You Sound like Yeats, but You re not. Well, happy Voyage home, Kenneth, to The parking lot Of understood experience. I'll be Here if you need me and here After you don t Need anything else. HERE is a quality I have, and have had For you, and for a lot of others, Just by being it, since you were born." How lucky that I ran into you When everything was possible For my legs and arms, and with hope in my heart And so happy to see any woman( O woman! O my twentieth year! Basking in you, you Oasis from both growing and decay Fantastic unheard of nine- or ten-year oasis A palm tree, hey! And then another And another (and water! I'm still very impressed by you. Whither, Midst falling decades, have you gone? Oh in what lucky fellow, Unsure of himself, upset, and unemployable For the moment in any case, do you live now? From my window I drop a nickel By mistake. With You I race down to get it But I find there on The street instead, a good friend, X---- N------, who says to me Kenneth do you have a minute? And I say yes! I am in my twenties! I have plenty of time! In you I marry, In you I first go to France; I make my best friends In you, and a few enemies. I Write a lot and am living all the time And thinking about living. I loved to frequent you After my teens and before my thirties. You three together in a bar I always preferred you because you were midmost Most lustrous apparently strongest Although now that I look back on you What part have you played? You never, ever, were stingy. What you gave me you gave whole But as for telling Me how best to use it You weren't a genius at that. Twenties, my soul Is yours for the asking You know that, if you ever come back.
		Excerpted from New Addresses by Kenneth Koch. Copyright © 2000 by Kenneth Koch. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Photo credit © Larry Rivers