Bluto in a White Suit

My memory is patchy and unreliable. But I have an enduring memory from my senior year of high school of the time a poet visited my English class and read to us some of his work, which we had been studying.

That evening, I was serving drinks at a (now shuttered) bar called the Eastern Standard in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia. My after-school job. I couldn’t legally drink, but I could waitress. I spotted the poet seated with friends at one of the tables. I stopped and said, “Aren’t you Cornelius Eady?” He was astonished. It might have been the only time a stranger had ever recognized him in public. He said he was, and I told him how he’d been to my class and how much I enjoyed his poetry. He seemed genuinely pleased. It remains my favorite celebrity encounter.

I was thinking of that moment about a week ago, only I couldn’t come up with the poet’s name. I could see his face, and my efforts to conjure his name made me grimace and pull my hair. My laboring brain came up with Gregory Orr, who is indeed a poet, but the wrong one. It finally came to me after I determined not to think about it. I immediately Googled “Cornelius Eady” and reviewed his bibliography. I ordered a used copy of his first book, Kartunes, now out of print, which was the only one he’d published by the time he visited my high school. The paperback arrived a few days later, stained and with a broken spine haphazardly repaired with Scotch tape (not exactly the promised “good” condition) and inscribed to someone named Barb.

I flipped the pages and scanned the poems, trying to find a familiar passage, anything still lodged in my memory. Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, then — I knew it immediately. “Bluto in a White Suit.” That was the one. As I read, the scene came back into focus: Bluto, reformed. Civilized now, done with violence. The wariness of the narrator. The tension in the interaction, the guitar string stuck too hard, the grasping of your hand. He has changed, and he is here to show you.

You won’t find the poem online. If you search the title, Google will serve you images of the cartoon character, Popeye’s nemesis, dressed in white. So I’m posting it here, at least until Mr. Eady asks me to remove it.

We’ve all had our fill of content; we need more poetry. Enjoy this one. It’s a gem.