Two Poems by Charles Rammelkamp

Climax

On a whim, driving home from Kalamazoo
with my octogenarian mother beside me,
we swerved into Exit 92, destination Climax.

Yes, the sign had always intrigued me,
thirty miles down the interstate
from my mother’s house –
which I still thought of as “home,”
despite having left over forty years earlier,
the house where I’d grown up,
where my mother’d been living alone
since her husband died a decade before.

This has got to be some kind of adventure,
I thought, implicit in the town’s name.
(Town? I wondered. A “village,”
I’d later learn when I Googled it,
2010 population 767.)

We drove down a long country road
past stubbled autumn corn fields,
a few lonely houses dotting the landscape.
Had we missed it?

Of course I remembered Camp Climax
from Kubrick’s film version of Nabokov’s Lolita.
Secretly wishing for something from The Twilight Zone,
some time warp, a tear in the fabric of reality,
where we found ourselves in the Eighteenth Century,
maybe a public hanging just for spice.

When at last we came upon
the old stone post office,
I kept hearing Peggy Lee’s disillusioned,
Is that all there is?

But, as we headed back to the highway,
Mom and I shared an amused smile.
Yes, it had been an adventure!

Ode to the Ampersand

Twinkle, twinkle, little star
killed you, O ampersand, 
not long after the Civil War.
Once the twenty-seventh letter of the alphabet,
now, demoted to what? A conjunction?

You are the Pluto of the alphabet,
demoted to dwarf status, a freak.
Appearing in Old Roman Cursive 
as early as the first century,
you’ve been exiled from the ABCs.

Your very name a mondegreen,
once standing for “and per se and,”
students reciting the alphabet –
“X, Y, Z, and per se and” –
gave you the name “ampersand.”

Rules hem you in now like a farm animal.
You must compete with “and” to be heard.
I see you used in poems and the names of law firms,
Bed & Breakfast, Rhythm & Blues, Barnes & Noble,
but your reputation is the stenographer’s “and.”

One of Mozart’s first compositions as a child –
an arrangement of the French melody,
Ah vous dirai-je, mama
(the same tune used in “Bah bah black sheep”) –
the Englishwoman Jane Taylor wrote the poem in 1806.

But when it became a child’s mnemonic
for memorizing the alphabet, you were doomed.
 “Double You, Ex, Why and Zee and per se and”
simply didn’t scan,
so you had to be removed, O ampersand!