“Alexander Hamilton Junior High School
-- SEMESTER REPORT --
STUDENT: Joseph Margolis
TEACHER: Janet Hicks
ENGLISH: A, ARITHMETIC: A, SOCIAL STUDIES: A, SCIENCE: A, NEATNESS: A, PUNCTUALITY: A, PARTICIPATION: A, OBEDIENCE: D
Teacher's Comments:
Joseph remains a challenging student. While I appreciate his creativity, I am sure you will agree that a classroom is an inappropriate forum for a reckless imagination. There is not a shred of evidence to support his claim that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian, and even fewer grounds to explain why he even knows what the word means. Similarly, an analysis of the Constitutional Convention does not generate sufficient cause to initiate a two-hour classroom debate on what types of automobiles the Founding Fathers would have driven were they alive today. When asked on a subsequent examination, "What did Benjamin Franklin use to discover electricity?" eleven children responded "A Packard convertible". I trust you see my problem.
[...]
Janet Hicks
Parent's Comments:
As usual I am very proud of Joey's grades. I too was unaware that Dolley Madison was a Lesbian. I assumed they were all Protestants.
Thank you for writing.
Ida Margolis”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
“The only thing I know about Moses is him coming down from the mountain with the commandments and saying 'The good news is I got him down to 10. The bad news is adultery is still in.”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
“Mr. Herbert Demarest
Alexander Hamilton Jr. High
2236 Bedford Avenue
Brooklyn NY
Dear Mr Demarest,
Then why don't you give him 'Withering Heights'? At least Heathcoat knew how to kick some ass.
Chas. Banks
3d Base”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
“Your head and your heart are two different things. One of them can get you into trouble and the other can't. It's okay to be scared when you can't tell them apart. That happened to me every day of my life. But nobody saw it except you.”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
“Everyone has something worth it inside of them even if it doesn’t show. Sometimes you have to look a little harder than other times but don’t give up. Otherwise all your going to see is a sorehead who plays 3d base.”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
“When you get famous or rich and maybe you think that you wish I was there to see it, remember that one way or the other I am.”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
“The last thing you will always remember is the most important one. A long time ago I told you I did not know for a fact yet that you were somebody special. Now I do.
I love you Bucko.”
― Steve Kluger, quote from Last Days of Summer
Steve Kluger
Born place: in Baltimore, MD, The United States
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“The Dying Man"
in memoriam W.B. Yeats
1. His words
I heard a dying man
Say to his gathered kin,
“My soul’s hung out to dry,
Like a fresh salted skin;
I doubt I’ll use it again.
“What’s done is yet to come;
The flesh deserts the bone,
But a kiss widens the rose
I know, as the dying know
Eternity is Now.
“A man sees, as he dies,
Death’s possibilities;
My heart sways with the world.
I am that final thing,
A man learning to sing.
2. What Now?
Caught in the dying light,
I thought myself reborn.
My hand turn into hooves.
I wear the leaden weight
Of what I did not do.
Places great with their dead,
The mire, the sodden wood,
Remind me to stay alive.
I am the clumsy man
The instant ages on.
I burned the flesh away,
In love, in lively May.
I turn my look upon
Another shape than hers
Now, as the casement blurs.
In the worst night of my will,
I dared to question all,
And would the same again.
What’s beating at the gate?
Who’s come can wait.
3. The Wall
A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn.
I found my father when I did my work,
Only to lose myself in this small dark.
Though it reject dry borders of the seen,
What sensual eye can keep and image pure,
Leaning across a sill to greet the dawn?
A slow growth is a hard thing to endure.
When figures our of obscure shadow rave,
All sensual love’s but dancing on a grave.
The wall has entered: I must love the wall,
A madman staring at perpetual night,
A spirit raging at the visible.
I breathe alone until my dark is bright.
Dawn’s where the white is. Who would know the dawn
When there’s a dazzling dark behind the sun.
4. The Exulting
Once I delighted in a single tree;
The loose air sent me running like a child–
I love the world; I want more than the world,
Or after image of the inner eye.
Flesh cries to flesh, and bone cries out to bone;
I die into this life, alone yet not alone.
Was it a god his suffering renewed?–
I saw my father shrinking in his skin;
He turned his face: there was another man,
Walking the edge, loquacious, unafraid.
He quivered like a bird in birdless air,
Yet dared to fix his vision anywhere.
Fish feed on fish, according to their need:
My enemies renew me, and my blood
Beats slower in my careless solitude.
I bare a wound, and dare myself to bleed.
I think a bird, and it begins to fly.
By dying daily, I have come to be.
All exultation is a dangerous thing.
I see you, love, I see you in a dream;
I hear a noise of bees, a trellis hum,
And that slow humming rises into song.
A breath is but a breath: I have the earth;
I shall undo all dying with my death.
5. They Sing, They Sing
All women loved dance in a dying light–
The moon’s my mother: how I love the moon!
Out of her place she comes, a dolphin one,
Then settles back to shade and the long night.
A beast cries out as if its flesh were torn,
And that cry takes me back where I was born.
Who thought love but a motion in the mind?
Am I but nothing, leaning towards a thing?
I scare myself with sighing, or I’ll sing;
Descend O gentlest light, descend, descend.
I sweet field far ahead, I hear your birds,
They sing, they sing, but still in minor thirds.
I’ve the lark’s word for it, who sings alone:
What’s seen recededs; Forever’s what we know!–
Eternity defined, and strewn with straw,
The fury of the slug beneath the stone.
The vision moves, and yet remains the same.
In heaven’s praise, I dread the thing I am.
The edges of the summit still appall
When we brood on the dead or the beloved;
Nor can imagination do it all
In this last place of light: he dares to live
Who stops being a bird, yet beats his wings
Against the immense immeasurable emptiness of things.”
― Theodore Roethke, quote from The Collected Poems
“scratch the surface and we were all going nuts in a thousand quiet ways.”
― John Joseph Adams, quote from The Living Dead
“I do not want to date you."
He groaned. "Liv. You've got to be kidding me. I picked up my whole life, drove halfway across the country, and you've changed your mind? It's only been fifteen days since you told me you still love me!"
"Shut up, will you? Will you please just shut up and kiss me again, you big idiot?" With both hands on his face, she molded her lips to his as her heart did a happy dance in her chest. Between kisses, she said, "I want to live with you and marry you and have a family with you and share your life--all the things you said you wanted from me before I ruined it. So no, I will not date you.”
― Marie Force, quote from Everyone Loves a Hero
“Nature's silence is its one remark, and every flake of world is a chip off that old mute and immutable block. The Chiense say that we live in the world of ten thousand things. Each of the ten thousand things cries out to us precisely nothing.”
― Annie Dillard, quote from Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters
“It’s hard to tell the truth sometimes, especially if you don’t want to hurt someone. And you did. You said what you feel. And you must do what is right for you, not what other people say is right.”
― Louise Rennison, quote from Love Is a Many Trousered Thing
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