The Playboy Calendar and the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.

• Author: Espada, Martin
• Position: Poem

The year I graduated from high school, my father gave me a Playboy calendar and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. On the calendar, he wrote: Enjoy the scenery. In the book of poems, he wrote: I introduce you to an old friend. The Beast was my only friend in high school, a wrestler who crushed the coach's nose with his elbow, fractured the fingers of all his teammates, could drink half a dozen vanilla milkshakes, and signed up with the Marines because his father was a Marine. I showed the Playboy calendar to The Beast and he howled like a silverback gorilla trying to impress an expedition of anthropologists. I howled too, smitten with the blonde called Miss January , held high in my simian hand. Yet, alone at night, I memorized the poet-astronomer of Persia, his saints and sages bickering about eternity, his angel looming in the tavern door with a jug of wine, his battered caravanserai of sultans fading into the dark. At seventeen, the laws of privacy have been revoked by the authorities, and the secret police are everywhere: I learned to hide Khayyám and his beard inside the folds of the Playboy calendar in case anyone opened the door without knocking, my...