Holden Poem by Robert Rorabeck

I was the only one in a class of fifty
Who defended Holden Caulfield,
Even though I look like Robert Ackley,
Have his name,
His complexion, and his religion!
But I’m not so simple a nemesis, for I
Have watched Phoebe go around on
The red horse in the rain:
Around, and around,
And around. She could be my little sister
Too, that’s how much I can relate,
But there is no use in saving her or anybody
Else, not in the way that is expected.
The feminist professor
In the night class in Turlington Hall,
In Gainesville FL. wished to identify him by
Proclaiming him a misfit, and all the petit
Feminists agreed, in pink rows, and the
Boys in baseball caps agreed too: that was
The game. There could be nothing scarier
Than Phoebe sitting there with us and
Carrying on: That’s what Holden knew.
I barely talked, I barely talked
At all and that must have been eight years ago.
I would ride home to her religion in
The student ghetto and
We would catch Letterman on t.v.,
Laugh, and eat, and fart, and fool around,
But she’s gone away too, married a lawyer
And gotten a good haul, but she has failed even
When the professor would say she was right to do so.
Not like Holden or I have, fallen because
We have gone down like model rockets and
Never re-ignited, down into the misplaced
Weeds crowning the heads of alligators on
The other side of the canal,
Like paper burning from the open windows
Of sky-scrapers. I worked at Taco
Bell for four months, and got fat for a little
While, and filled tacos with one of the girls in my
Class.
We both got C+s, but she had nothing at
All to say in regards to Holden Caulfield,
And her name was Greek for catastrophe,
Though I tried my best in his defense, I could say
So little out loud, since we were speaking in a
Language whose annunciations only work while
In a crowd, but still I would put on the
Red hunting cap against the world,
And recognize the inability to proclaim
The hypocrisies which only silence’s observation
Identifies:
The cannibalisms of well-dressed loves,
And the people who pull in the shades of gossip,
But only get in by dress-code.
That professor is still astonishingly prolific,
And grew-up across the street from the
Caulfield’s I suspect, but
She’ll never be even semi-autobiographical
To Salinger,
Though she has said many things that echo up
And down the hall, into each child
Who she deems her reverberations, it is oh so doubtful
She has yet to acknowledge Holden Caulfield’s
Inability to succeed as a judgment call upon those
Artless establishments where she very happily
Nooks her world.