The Best American Poetry 2013 by David Lehman Page B

days some wrong ideas were held.
    Around the time Kennedy was elected and
    Eve Grabuskawa began her menopause,
    Grandma Fogarty was told to take her leave.
    Grandma Fogarty was sent on her way.
    No more did Grandma Fogarty come calling
    At all hours of the night like a will-o’-the-wisp
    Fluttering, flickering, and then fully ablaze.
    As Eve and Joe’s union passed twenty years,
    Grandma Fogarty was nowhere to be found.
    But is this not a familiar story as married
    Couples age and passion’s flame sinks?
    Let us turn to the much more novel story
    Of how Joe Adamczyk, the Chicago bartender,
    Transformed himself into a man of ideas.
    No stale autodidact would he become,
    But a thinker comfortable and at home
    In a variety of disciplines, reading widely
    In libraries, copying pages, memorizing
    Long passages, and making diagrams.
    He would hardly sleep. He ate little and,
    As was true of Edmund Burke,
    Anyone trapped under a tree with him
    In a sudden rain would quickly see
    That Joe Adamczyk was a first-rate mind.
    With time his interests would encompass
    Gottlob Frege and Whitehead and also
    Alonzo Church and Church’s dissertation
    Awarded at Princeton in 1927 entitled
    Alternatives to Zermelo’s Assumption .
    His transformation began inauspiciously,
    Meandering for years like a stream.
    Paint-by-numbers was his first awakening:
    Sunsets, views of old windmills,
    Solitary reapers, the heads of noble steeds.
    In faux-impressionist style these emerged
    From the confusing higgledy-piggledy
    Of lines and numbers on canvas glued
    To cardboard. Joe could execute a large
    Paint-by-numbers landscape in one day.
    Somehow from his paintings a hunger
    For narrative gradually developed.
    He imagined stories of people who
    Lived in his paint-by-numbers cabins
    With smoke curling from the chimneys.
    Fascinated by the concept of man
    As a story-telling animal, he began
    Serious reading for the first time in his life.
    He read The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk
    And Marjorie Morningstar , also by Wouk.
    He followed Wouk with the historical novels
    Of Irving Stone: Lust for Life , Men to Match
    My Mountains , and The Agony and the Ecstasy .
    He read the bestselling Magnificent Obsession
    And The Big Fisherman , both by Lloyd C. Douglas.
    He amused himself by considering life
    As a stage play. Was it tragedy or farce?
    He pondered the nature of storytelling,
    Then took the short leap, intellectually,
    To viewing the world itself as a narrative.
    Turning his attention to nonfiction,
    In Volume Two of Will and Ariel Durant’s
    The Story of Civilization he discovered
    The concept of telos in a discussion of
    Greek philosophy and the work of Aristotle.
    He gnawed the concept of telos like a dog
    With a bone. He toyed with the caprice
    That even mathematics might be teleological:
    An unwinding tale with a start, a middle,
    And perhaps an end returning to the beginning.
    He grew careless of his tavern and
    Heedless of Eve Grabuskawa, still his wife.
    He felt drawn to the used bookstores
    And hole-in-the-wall coffeehouses
    Near the University of Chicago.
    The day came when without a word
    Joe left Eve Grabuskawa and rented
    A room on South Harper Avenue.
    He immersed himself in the collegiate
    Ambience of the University of Chicago.
    In a coffeehouse called the Pegasus
    He saw a reproduction—displayed
    With ironic intent—of the portrait
    Entitled Arrangement in Grey and Black ,
    Also known as Whistler’s Mother .
    He was shocked, was set back on his heels
    By the subject’s strong resemblance
    To Eve Grabuskawa. Had all those years
    Of marriage to Eve Grabuskawa been
    A dour arrangement in gray and black?
    It was the last time he ever thought
    Of Eve Grabuskawa, who evanesced
    Like the Cheshire Cat, and even his
    Attraction to women in general
    Deliquesced like Frosty the Snowman.
    Yet the Pegasus was known for pulchritude.
    It was the era of girls in black turtlenecks
    With love for jazz and folk