Line 6: Too naive and trusting, I did not realize the facts of her activities until after our break up on January 9, 1978; after which, her roommate told me, on Saturday morning, January 14, 1978, in these words: "The woman you have loved is not the woman who lives on our floor in the dormitory," followed by a brief description of her activities.
Line 7: At my college, if a female removed her shoes in a male's dormitory room, this was interpreted as a tacit sign of consent to some form of intimacy. In the all-male dormitories, where the female bathrooms were usually found by the common television rooms only, getting one's date or girl friend to walk to that bathroom without shoes was a status symbol of the highest intensity. The male present in my Tanka sequence, "Lady Flowerchild," actually compelled his girl friend to walk to the female bathroom, accompanied by him (grinning like a possum eating dog poop) whether she needed to use the facility or not; timing it, always, during the television networks' prime time.
Lines 9-10: Off campus, the houses of fraternity and sorority were veritable dens of adolescent iniquity: alcoholism, drug addiction, and both sexual promiscuity and perversity; and, in two instances of which I am aware, traumatic physical injury and death. This was during the seventies. By the late eighties, a wave of reform swept through the college, decreasing the number of fraternities and sororities, and placing some extreme limitations on their ability to recruit, or to conduct activities unmonitored within their buildings.
She was the second woman I loved. We began to date right after I graduated high school. She came to the college, she said, to be with me; but the extreme liberty of campus life, so different from the domestic repression she had lived with at home all of her life, altered her behavior. I have never forgiven my college for destroying our relationship. Although I became engaged twice, thereafter, and the second engagement became my first marriage, I did not get over Aurora until I met my second wife, Lady Certainly, on December 18th, 1992. As if my own sorrow was not sufficient a torment, the couple I call, in other poems, Pi and Kaph---close friends of mine from senior year in high school, who had been dating since their freshman year, and who were expected, by all others, to remain together forever---ended their relationship that same year.
I apologize for any typos that may still remain in the poem or these notes. I think I have caught and corrected all of them, but it is too early in the morning for me to be totally accurate.
