Ten days in NYC learning the law with the Best / Brightest.
August profs just this side of greatness, their Ivy League creds,
Political appointments jogged out at every intro.
Cuff links, seersucker—Roscoe’s in Martha’s Vineyard again!—
Coral glasses worn to match the pants, to match the silent satisfaction of
Yale and Princeton, safe from their dingy outskirts,
Northeast train-linked sub-orbs of the Old Order,
Preserved by the White Shoe Law Firms, and, of course, the Schools.
It means something still. It is written in their lives.

I said that when a guy like Matt,
Good guy all and all,
Comes up out of the best private schools in New York,
Slides into Yale and thence to Stanford,
The future is loomed by Four Towers:
Law, Medicine, Finance, Office.
It’s almost as if their world 
Is smaller than ours:
It’s Manhattan and Palo Alto,
London and Beijing.
But as for the rest of it, 
All the fly-over squares of wheat and subdivision,
All so forgettable and sad and lamentable,
All so small, terribly small and terribly sad,
And did I say lamentable?
Fly over it all they must—and they do.

A good lawyer will turn that claim around,
Find the exceptions, and the exceptions are
There—children moving up and down the ladder.
Harvard produces its burnouts and malcontents,
Listless intellects disgusted by the options before them,
Earnest civil servants, shopkeeper’s daughters rising on pride.
These stories are true,
But so are the Partners, the Politicians, the Professors—
The scions of our American royalty.

And, yes, of course, I’ve wished to be among them.
But the day dreams, the best ones, are always to go down and
Out of it, not to come up. 
To burn my checkered jacket in a barrel
On Brighton Beach and write poems on a shoe.
For herein lies the truth that is perhaps
The greatest comfort to the obscure: 
Turning away from that kind of fortune has always been
Braver than earning it.