THE PROFESSOR OF CIVIL PROCEDURE

(in memory of Adolf Homberger)

 

 

When we were young and tired, who now at dawn

with industry of those engaged to fawn

hustle forth into the sulfurous airs

of home toward the County Courthouse where

Daddy forged our steel connections, give

the indispensable assistance of

the Good Old Boys from out the Good Old Ward,

the Professor made us feel the hard

condition of our ignorance and then

rejoice in it, promise-crammed, for when

there is much to learn, there is much

to come.  The noblest  problem’s just a grudge

unless thought suit an action to the word,

returning work to love and love to work.

 

Down from the dais’ scarred and riven height

he strode like Jove, his raised hands charged with light,

twin bolts to banish ancient darkness’ reign

and quicken pathways of the untried brain:

the line of enquiry and call of roll!

By these two means, he played upon the hall

to sound us out.  Our answers stood if true

by antiphon, responsively, in lieu

of lecture, as a witness’ answers tell

the story if one chooses questions well.

Sometimes, he’d mount the rows with martial eye,

each step a beat in time to diatribe,

til awfully at rest beside the peccant,

poised like doom to drop, he left the fecund

subject of the faulty answer, seized

the hapless creature’s notes and as he pleased,

crisply turning over leaves, began

upon the foolish musings of the man.

 

Yet there was no malice in this man

and no one was hurt.  He construed his plan

not to disparage sourly but empower

with the endless value of an hour

(bright hole in time through which a sighted truth

marks for good the landscape of one’s youth)

to the human mind and hand and way

in whose image all the gods were made.

His teaching did not suffer from a lack

of faith in us but was a pious act.

His Austrian fin de siecle pedagogy,

just by way of the redeemer’s habit,

kept the best of the old world, the one

from which he fled, defenestrating from

the loo to undertake that pilgrimage

he came to venerate in middle age

from his exclusive suburb, ducking Gerry

aft his own expensive topiary.

Our final term, he called us “Sir,” heedless

of our genders.  Now he gazed in needless

awe at tattered pupils.  His the eye

that inward turning sees what bye and bye

will come to be within the fraying case:

the more the wear, the surer wings to race.

 

He was blind to this blind town and blessed

the ground as if the place that held this guest,

imagine, saved him.  His escape, another

law degree, a home much like the other

were his doing, not the sad, bad town’s

for having him.  It just let him go on

until it ceased to do so.  He left to take

a Chair in the great city.  For the sake

of stubborn loyalty, he would come back

for services of home, for care, to Yak

and revel in his colleagues’ troubled caution,

“A place to come from, not a destination.”

But he had his doctors here, believed

in their good will.  He died about to leave

the clinic after minor surgery

and no one knew a thing about it.  He

became the evidence in his own case,

admitted by the rule that fate keeps pace

with states of mind that bare intent and faze

the living with a wishful dead man’s gaze

bent on setting fatal course to seek:

“I think that I shall go to Crooked Creek.”[1]

 

His folly was respectable and killed him.

More, this end was likely; the past had willed him

to deny that other Adolf, simple,

focused, murderous, a man of the people

but hardly for them, driven by one wish,

for the small pond that makes such men big fish.

But his the civil need for the spirit’s home

that leads to blind, unbidden faith in some

ill-suited place constrained to serve belief

in Greater Good or some such grand conceit,

inform with meaning one’s existence, offer

rank due pride because in worthy Order.

 

His, too, the civil need to quaff the mead

of gratitude in lusty gulps, to heed

the world as he required it be in health,

in order to continue as himself,

to die as live by faith that doctors heal,

lawyers help, and a people’s commonweal

concerns itself with credo like his own:

the soul unique, however poor, alone

or hated for good reason on death row,

perhaps with form and comeliness in woe

for none but pacifists, that alpha and

omega of vocation, solid land

without which we are lost in vacant space,

the moral landscape without feature paced

by Everyman, that literal witness blessed

with fundamental answers strained from texts,

to whom the Law of Averages applies,

thumping the Bible prior to telling lies.

 

So for relief of Anyman, bright Key,

the faithful said his prayers in equity,

“Before the lord our king where he might be

in Promised Land.”[2]  Surely, in the wide beam

of reason, right procedure equally

provided was all people’s guarantee.

Surely, matters of life and death, like laws,

are always recognizable, because

the enemy arrives in uniform

and breaks the door down.  Careless of the norm,

he mistook his place, imputing goodness

to a world not as he thought or was,

where law is policy and science gain

and the professions all corrupt or vain.

 

The unpleasant truth is, better people

don’t endure in jungles, snatching keep

where the end justifies the means

to grasp entitlements due fortune’s deans.

The fittest to survive, some killing bore,

is usually fit for little more.

An insect trod upon a man and crushed him.

Still, he blessed the young with vision, touched them.

We see we are our argument and not

our fame, our song, expired on Yak town’s hot,

unwholesome breeze and not the hall’s weak tears,

shed for fun.  We are a dance of years,

beaten out on plains of lead and death,

not the gold cast, as we wane to rest,

at our flying feet.  So our teacher lends

such gracious means to justify our ends.