"Away to College" by Howard Stein

Away to College

Howard Stein

                                 Away to college--

                                we were so close,

                                now you are gone....

                               I  instead of we,

                               was instead of is--

                              a new language

                              for this new life.

"Missing" Ink on Paper
By J. Artemus Gordon

The house reeks of ghosts;

remembering haunts the place,

absences I can almost touch.

Then there is all you left behind,

parts of stories I still can touch --

now you are gone from them.

Every place turns up a memory

like an ambush.

Wherever I turn, I lose you again.

I wander the Oklahoma prairie

the way Lord Byron's Manfred

wandered the Alps.

I search for you in farmsteads,

in wheat fields, in grain silos,

in sunsets, in storms,

on every horizon.

I encounter you

in the most unlikely places,

then you vanish.

I keep losing you to the wind.

Poet's Notes: I wrote this poem in 2012 when my son went away to college.  We had shared so much -- Marx Brothers' movies, Bruckner and Mahler symphonies, a weekly "boys' night out" at a local restaurant, and ribald Jewish humor.  And then he left for college--as of course, he should. My wife and I had prepared for this for over a year. Everything was set. Then came the void, which the cliché "empty nest" couldn't begin to describe.  Even though we visited him and took him to a local restaurant at least once a month and knew that in reality, he was only forty-five miles away, the distance felt like light years. This poem virtually wrote itself during that upheaval.