Tom Lyford has original poetry books and memoirs for sale on-line, and offers poetry readings and workshops in northern New England...
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MR. SALINGER, I PRESUME

Picture

An intimidated, introverted, first-day


Academy freshman… I alight with

immediate obedience in the seat

indicated by Miss Black, the harsh

card-carrying minion of

Alphabetical Seating

 
A boxy wooden desk, this work-

station, now my period 2, study-hall,

home away from home, has a rugged

slide-out book bin under the seat

and while The Schoolmarm delivers

her Day-1 Diatribe, her Quakers’ Meeting

 
Rules: no talking, no whispering,

no giggling, no note-writing,

no eating, no sleeping, no slouching,

no looking around, no... fill in the blank

(and all etched in stone, mind you!)

I am inching that book-drawer open

 
and letting my adventurous fingers,

the new ‘tenants,’ do the walking

the sleuthing, and eventually the excavating

of the first of its treasures…

Ah, a slender volume entitled

Nine Short Stories...


with all nine titles

emblazoned on the cover,

some of which oddly intrigue…

“A Perfect Day for Bananafish”

“Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes”

“Just Before the War With the Eskimos”...

 
—from a random page I read: …A woman with zinc salve

on her nose got into the elevator with the young man.

“I see you’re looking at my feet,” he said when the car was in motion.

“I beg your pardon?” said the woman.

“I said I see you’re looking at my feet.”

“I beg your pardon. I happen to be looking at the floor,”

 
said the woman, and faced the doors of the car.

“If you want to look at my feet, say so…

but don’t be a goddamn sneak about it.”

“Let me out of here, please,” the woman

said quickly to the girl operating the car.

I smirk… hopelessly and helplessly smitten--

 
Fate, in the guise of Alphabetical Seating

which might’ve seated me in the desk of the

romance-rag-reading Home Ec girl… or the

gloriously unread Future Farmer of America…

has instead, amazingly-gracefully, seen fit to

deliver me into the bounty of a literat

 
upperclassman’s homeroom seat… a

surreptitious glance-down into the

breached trove reveals (ohmygod!)

the infamous and banned… Catcher in the Rye…

ApparentlyI am nesting in the branches of

the fabled Tree of Forbidden Knowledge! (YES!)

 
Oh, the delicious hours spent in this 

study hall will pass way too quickly!

Picture
Dover-Foxcroft's Rogue Poet Laureate since... well, OK... only 2010