Letter to Emporia

Dear David and Buddy—

Please don’t believe everything I write—

Whether it’s imploring midwestern noir poetics

Or being ensconced now in new Kenyon Heights

Miss Anita B. Rice died in 1994, of course—

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~ksfhgslc/obit90qr.html

There’s no way she could be living now with me now

Except in my midwestern noir fictional fantasy—

It’s nice you were able to visit her back then

At the Presbyterian retirement home though

One’s perception I suppose of those incredible—

Midwestern monolithic personalities back then

With the looming Easter Island image of Bloxom

Standing there at that same third floor door—

Greeting us with his continuous grimace back

Then each morning like he’d done for centuries

Photos of Wood as football coach back in 1938—

All of them standing there against the brick wall

Of the western EHS façade below his class window

Teaching in the same classroom back in the ‘40s—

When my mother walked those same hallways

And sat at those same scarred bolted-down desks

It wasn’t just plane geometry Wood preached—

It was everything else under the sun including

The fact that Hispanics were surely doomed

Holding all those generations not so enthralled—

As he was with his high-toned lecturing voice

His features gnarled like gargoyles from Chartres

“Somewhere in Kansas the sun is shining—

But it’s not shining down here on Emporia today”

Was like his continuous rant and by-line message

And he was probably true as was Anita Rice—

Saying daily “I’m simply appalled, my dear” when

Nobody could answer her American History questions

That Wood was seemingly racist was bad enough—

But he was also downgrading and misogynist toward

Budding young women scholars like Connie Leonhart

Who won a National Merit Scholarship to Stanford—

There in Palo Alto like Larry Ballard to MIT but that

Was something we all had to put up with back then

I doubt if a teacher like Wood Bloxom with attitude—

Could get away with what he opined those mornings

To us his captive audience of denigrated youngsters

But that was then from another generation—

Can you imagine being nailed down all those years

To one class of dummies after another?

No wonder Wood and Anita were cynical I suppose—

And yet it was a job like his wife there at Walnut

Rice, Bloxom, Price, Parker all of them gone now

Being lock-step captives since Walnut Elementary—

All the way up through EHS and perhaps KSTC

Surely it was a rather unique social situation?

Growing up that way with a group of people that—

From Emporia who would’ve just been strangers

Had it not been for such a unique school system?

No wonder buildings like Lowther and EHS—

Standing lonely like Neo-Classical Temples there

On West Sixth Avenue could be so very haunting

And the YMCA across the street with its pool—

Basketball court, juke box and dancing room

Torn down now and just a forlorn parking lot

So much of Emporia history gone now like—

The Hood Mansion on State Street where

Marion Howard the Spanish teacher lived

Me and my divorced mother in a little shack—

Across the street on Seventh Avenue just up

From Roberts-Barnett-Blue Funeral Home

How gaunt and gothic the Hood Mansion—

Standing there in the Midwestern moonlight

Reminding of Hitchcock’s “Psycho” mansion

And yet it had its own Emporia history—

With Major Hood from the Civil War days

Cattleman mover & shaker bankster lord

The gone First Christian Church on Exchange—

Byzantine with its moody domes and its basement

Smelling of some kind of strange incense there

Baptized but not really knowing why it was—

That my County Commissioner grandfather and

G.A.R. grandmother insisted I get dunked then

Norton Hall on Twelfth on the KSTC campus—

Where I stood enthralled gazing horrified at

The bottled babies embalmed in formaldehyde

Vernon Sheffield coming to my comfort back—

Then when he was a math professor, hearing me

Sobbing forlornly there by the display cabinets

There but for the grace of God I could’ve been—

Bottled in bug-eyed perpetuity staring out at

The passer-bys peering at the dead embryos

Sheffield playing Chopin for me on the piano—

Soothing my shocked adolescent impressionable

Mind back then, his recitals were inspiring