Deborah Orin

Blair once wrote a poem about Deborah, mostly
about how they met as teenagers when they were
at a summer program for super-brainy high
school kids called Telluride.

Ithaca, New York (Summer 1963)


Cherries to guns -- that was the path
Your reminiscence took me down. Innocent
As we were at sixteen, it appeared
On my computer one spring morning:
The fresh-picked fruit, staining the white
Hood of a happy city girl's new jacket.


That summer started with another innocent remark,
Made by a teacher standing over me
In a gymnasium full of sweating children
Facing clocks, number two pencils
And hours and hours of empty squares to mark
Check that box, he said, they'll send your scores
To some Foundation. You might win a prize.
 

I checked that box, all right. Afterward,
For once, the mail brought something other,
With that sheet of scores, than glares from parents
(too low) and boyfriends (too high).
It brought me university too early,
In ironic Ithaca, and the great dark house
Designed by Wright, with open benchy spaces
Where I met and lived with you, cool Plato,
Ford Maddox Ford, Aristotle, Bergman,
Woody Guthrie -- wondrous names, all new,
But never to be as new as the sudden freedom
from adolescent exile, my punishment
For carrying the wrong book, asking the wrong
Question, using the wrong word. That summer
Was banishment to Heaven.
(And not even a Heaven just for rich kids --
The Foundation paid for everything,
A Pied Piper that cost our parents nothing
But the final loss, by summer's end, of their
strange children.)


You emerged from that bright cave, became
Our star: the vivid guest on press jets and TV
News-hour programmes, the new name in print,
And still a woman who could call her lit-up life
A pale imitation of that summer,
And with that message pass on revelation.

Blair