Sorrow's springs are the same

The widow of my writing professor called last night from her home in Joshua Tree. She called this time last year and the year before. We've never met, but since her husband (though she would probably prefer another term) Richard Lee died, she calls. She refers to our holiday card and how pleased she is that she still receives it and asks about our family, our work, our writing. We talk about her late husband, which, I suppose is the reason she calls us. In some way, she is calling him.

Tonight we talked for half an hour. She has finished her memoir about Greenwich Village in the 40s and her time with Georgia O'Keefe and the deKoonings, Franz Kline, Joseph Heller, Joaquim Probst and others. Eventually, she met Dr. Lee (as I called him) there, when he was a student at NYU. They fell in love and moved out here when he got the position at Cal State in 1955. So, in 1981, when I wandered into his classroom clutching my overwritten poems, he had been teaching there for almost 40 years.

Here he is in the CSULB faculty parking lot. The photo was taken by David Barker and featured in Barker's book 12 Poets and Their Cars, published in 1972.

At the end of our conversation, she invited us to visit her and, since I've already thought about how beautiful the desert will be this spring with the rain and all, when I said yes, it didn't feel as if I were lying. It felt like the truth. I hope it is.

Dr. Richard Lee ran the poetry workshop I lingered in at Cal State Long Beach in the early 1980s. He had other, better students than I, including roots rocker and bluesman Dave Alvin. Another talented student was one Kyle Anne Bates who also published in IVC's literary journal, the Ear. (L.T. would remember her and her work, a poem about a UPS delivery person, I believe.)

Dr. Lee (I could never call him Richard) taught me how to read closely and widely and with joy. He loved Gerard Manley Hopkins, a poet who was unafraid of exclamation points and joy. Hopkins would have loved Joshua Tree.

This one is for Dr. Lee:

Spring and Fall - Gerard Manley Hopkins

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By & by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep & know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.