At first glance, I didn’t think he was cool
I scanned the committee, and none of them looked cool
I wondered what I was getting myself into
“They all look like nerds!” he exclaimed, surveying the hotel lobby
At the conference we were attending (before The Big Bang Theory made nerds cool)
“Careful,” I replied, “You’re going to spend your whole career with the likes of them.”
“Don’t tell me that. I can’t hear that now.”
I did an online search of an old professor for whom I was a T.A. and was on familiar terms.
He was the coolest guy I ever knew and at a party in his house,
I noticed a book of French fabliaux in the bathroom
Now a well-published professor of Indology and a yoga teacher in Santa Barbara
Which I think is about as cool as you can get
But Carol looked at his picture, with his wild hair, and said she didn’t think so.
“You think Dave’s cool?!” my roommate to my other roommate—I the accusative case.
Carol grew up on a farm, which makes her as natural as a person could be
And nature is not involved with that which is cool
We may view a lion or a wild boar as regal
But we wouldn’t see them as possessed of what is cool
Nature has no airs, no trendy styles, no current fashions, is no poseur: the ground
Carol is genuine, real, authentic, natural, like the beanfields she hoed
Like the Tao’s breath of the valley spirit, the uncarved wood
And being together with Carol, what is cool evaporates like mist in the mountain valley
Time wears down that which is cool,
As age steals beauty of a certain kind
Jobs can have the effect of cool
“I was learning to drive a rig; I went for status.”
A big pick-up truck will suffice for cool if you can’t drive a rig
And workers of jobs that are cool look down on others
“It’s your fault that 20-somethings don’t want to work and live in their parents’ basement.”
“You academics are to blame for all that political correctness and the ‘woke’ movement,”
He, to me, and then vanished into his conspiracy theories
Wearing his ball cap; me, the accusative case, wearing my beret, he resented
“I’ll bet he doesn’t even work on his own car,” I heard someone declaim
My friend from Harvard laughed and laughed when he heard it
Resentment piles upon resentment as the professions pay
Little respect to pipe-fitters—which all comes down to a form of cool—
Hip-Hop booming from the speakers in their BMWs as they pass you on the road
I’ve never noticed a pig looking down on a horse
A rabbit insult a mouse; a mouse, a groundhog
An oak, a poplar; a flower, a thistle
Nor an ocean wave ostentatious, a thunder cloud pretentious
And when I walk in the woods, I’m not a Harvard graduate
And Carol opened the chicken-wire gate and walked around with the hens and roosters
David Fekete 