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Midmorning like a deserted room, apparition Of armoire and table weights, Oblongs of flat light, the rosy eyelids of lovers Raised in their ghostly insurrection, Decay in the compassed corners beating its black wings, Late June and the lilac just ajar. Where the deer trail sinks down through the shadows of blue spruce, Reeds rustle and bow their heads, Creek waters murmur on like the lamentation of women For faded, forgotten things. And always the black birds in the trees, Always the ancient chambers thudding inside the heart. _________ Swallow pure as a penknife slick through the insected air. Swallow poised on the housepost, beakful of mud and a short straw. Swallow dun-orange, swallow blue, mud purse and middle arch, Home sweet home. Swallow unceasing, swallow unstill At sundown, the mother's shade over silver water. At the edge of the forest, no sound in the grey stone, No moan from the blue lupin. The shadows of afternoon begin to gather their dark robes And unlid their crystal eyes. Minute by minute, step by slow step, Like the small hand on a clock, we climb north, toward midnight. _________ I've made a small hole in the silence, a tiny one, Just big enough for a word. And when I rise from the dead, whenever that is, I'll say it. I can't remember the word right now, But it will come back to me when the northwest wind blows down off Mt. Caribou The day that I rise from the dead, whenever that is. Sunlight, on one leg, limps out to the meadow and settles in. Insects fall back inside their voices, Little fanfares and muted repeats, Inadequate language of sorrow, inadequate language of silted joy, As ours is. The birds join in. The sunlight opens her other leg. _________ At times the world falls away from us with all its disguises, And we are left with ourselves As though we were dead, or otherwised, our lips still moving, The empty distance, the heart Like a votive little-red-wagon on top of a child's grave, Nothing touching, nothing close. A long afternoon, and a long rain begins to fall. In some other poem, angels emerge from their cold rooms, Their wings blackened by somebody's dream. The rain stops, the robin resumes his post. A whisper Out of the clouds and here comes the sun. A long afternoon, the robin flying from post back to post. _________ The length of vowel sounds, by nature and by position, Count out the morning's meters— bird song and squirrel bark, creek run, The housefly's languor and murmurous incantation. I put on my lavish robes And walk at random among the day's dactyls and anapests, A widening caesura with each step. I walk through my life as though I were a bookmark, a holder of place, An overnight interruption in somebody else's narrative. What is it that causes this? What is it that pulls my feet down, and keeps on keeping my eyes fixed to the ground? Whatever the answer, it will start the wolf pack down from the mountain, The raven down from the tree. _________ Time gnaws on our necks like a dog gnaws on a stew bone. It whittles us down with its white teeth, It sends us packing, leaving no footprints on the dust-dour road. That's one way of putting it. Time, like a golden coin, lies on our tongue's another. We slide it between our teeth on the black water, ready for what's next. The white eyelids of dead boys, like flushed birds, flutter up At the edge of the timber. Domestic lupin Crayolas the yard. Slow lopes of tall grasses Southbound in the meadow, hurled along by the wind. In wingbeats and increments, The disappeared come back to us, the soul returns to the tree. _________ The intermittent fugues of the creek, saying yes, saying no, Master music of sunlight And black-green darkness under the spruce and tamaracks, Lull us and take our breath away. Our lips form fine words, But nothing comes out. Our lips are the messengers, but nothing can come out. After a day of high winds, how beautiful is the stillness of dusk. Enormous silence of stones. Illusion, like an empty coffin, that something is missing. Monotonous psalm of underbrush and smudged flowers. After the twilight, darkness. After the darkness, darkness, and then what follows that. _________ The unborn own all of this, what little we leave them, St. Thomas's hand returning repeatedly to the wound, Their half-formed mouths irrepressible in their half-sleep, Asking for everything, and then some. Already the melancholy of their arrival Swells like a sunrise and daydream over the eastern ridge line. Inside the pyrite corridors of late afternoon, Image follows image, clouds Reveal themselves, and shadows, like angels, lie at the feet of all things. Chambers of the afterlife open deep in the woods, Their secret hieroglyphics suddenly readable With one eye closed, then with the other. _________ One star and a black voyage, drifting mists to wish on, Bullbats and their lullabye— Evening tightens like an elastic around the hills. Small sounds and the close of day, As if a corpse had risen from somewhere deep in the meadow And walked in its shadows quietly. The mouth inside me with its gold teeth Begins to open. No words appear on its lips, no syllables bubble along its tongue. Night mouth, silent mouth. Like drugged birds in the trees, angels with damp foreheads settle down. Wind rises, clouds arrive, another night without stars.

Some folks hollered hard times in nineteen-twenty-nine. In nineteen-twenty-eight say I was way behind. Some folks hollered hard times because hard times were new. Hard times is all I ever had, why should I lie to you? Some folks hollered hard times. What is it all about? Things were bad for me when those hard times started out.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” “How like a well-kept garden is your soul.” The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints(1893). John Gray’s translation of Verlaine John Gray’s translation of Verlaine The quotation is from Gray’s translation of Paul Verlaine’s “Clair de lune,” from Gray’s book Silverpoints(1893). & Baudelaire’s Baudelaire’s French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) butcher in 1861 shorted him four centimes on a pound of tripe. tripe Cow’s stomach, prepared for human consumption He thought himself a clever man and, wiping the calves’ blood from his beefy hands, gazed briefly at what Tennyson called at what Tennyson called Not an actual phrase by Tennyson. Possibly a play on “Hateful is the dark-blue sky”, from Tennyson’s “The Lotos-eaters” “the sweet blue sky.” It was a warm day. What clouds there were were made of sugar tinged with blood. They shed, faintly, amid the clatter of carriages new settings of the songs Moravian Moravian Could refer to either a person from Moravia, a region of the Czech Republic, or a member of the Moravian Church. virgins sang on wedding days. The poet is a monarch of the clouds The poet is a monarch of the clouds Translation from Charles Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros”: “Le Poëte est semblable au prince des nuées” (line 13) & Swinburne Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale” : “trod by no tropic feet”. on his northern coast “ trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” Swinburne [...] “trod,” he actually wrote, “by no tropic foot,” A slight variant, from Swinburne’s elegy for Baudelaire, “Ave Atque Vale” : “trod by no tropic feet”. composed that lovely elegy elegy A melancholy poem that laments a person’s death but ends in consolation. See more in the Glossary of Poetic Terms. and then found out Baudelaire was still alive found out Baudelaire was still alive Baudelaire died August 31, 1867, but his death was erroneously reported four months earlier, in April of 1867. According to Swinburne biographer Edmund Gosse, “Baudelaire came to life again, and Swinburne was on the point of tearing up his elegy. However, Baudelaire died some months later, and, after a delay of eleven years, “Ave atque Vale” was at length included in the volume of 1878.” Read “Ave Atque Vale” here. whom he had lodged dreamily in a “deep division of prodigious breasts.” “deep division of prodigious breasts.” A direct quotation from Swinburne’s poem “Ave Atque Vale” Surely the poet is monarch of the clouds. He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, He hovers, like a lemon-colored kite, An allusion to Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem “The Windhover” over spring afternoons in the nineteenth century while Marx in the library while Marx in the library Karl Marx (1818-1883), political economist, researched works in the reading room of the British Museum in London for his major publication,Das Kapital gloom studies the birth rate of the weavers of Tilsit Tilsit A town in what was East Prussia, now named Sovetsk, Russia. Marx mentions the 1807 Peace Treaties of Tilsit in his 1870 correspondence with Friedrich Engels. and that gentle man Bakunin Bakunin Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876) was a Russian anarchist who participated in the Czech Rebellion of 1848. Bakunin met Karl Marx in Paris, and later Bakunin’s anarchist faction would clash with Marx’s socialist faction at a congress of the International Working Men’s Association, and Marx’s leadership prevailed and Bakunin and his men were expelled from the association. Bakunin had stood for violent overthrow, while Marx believed that existing political systems should be reformed into socialism. Compare to these lines from Larry Levis’ poem “At the Grave of My Guardian Angel: St. Louis Cemetery, New Orleans” : “And without beauty, Bakunin will go on making his forlorn & unreliable little bombs in the cold” , home after fingerfucking the countess, applies his numb hands to the making of bombs.

This year, till late in April, the snow fell thick and light: Thy truce-flag, friendly Nature, in clinging drifts of white, Hung over field and city: now everywhere is seen, In place of that white quietness, a sudden glow of green. The verdure climbs the Common, beneath the leafless trees, To where the glorious Stars and Stripes are floating on the breeze. There, suddenly as Spring awoke from Winter’s snow-draped gloom, The Passion-Flower of Seventy-six is bursting into bloom. Dear is the time of roses, when earth to joy is wed, And garden-plot and meadow wear one generous flush of red; But now in dearer beauty, to her ancient colors true, Blooms the old town of Boston in red and white and blue. Along the whole awakening North are those bright emblems spread; A summer noon of patriotism is burning overhead: No party badges flaunting now, no word of clique or clan; But “Up for God and Union!” is the shout of every man. Oh, peace is dear to Northern hearts; our hard-earned homes more dear; But freedom is beyond the price of any earthly cheer; And freedom’s flag is sacred; he who would work it harm, Let him, although a brother, beware our strong right arm! A brother! ah, the sorrow, the anguish of that word! The fratricidal strife begun, when will its end be heard? Not this the boon that patriot hearts have prayed and waited for;— We loved them, and we longed for peace: but they would have it war. Yes; war! on this memorial day, the day of Lexington, A lightning-thrill along the wires from heart to heart has run. Brave men we gazed on yesterday, to-day for us have bled: Again is Massachusetts blood the first for Freedom shed. To war,—and with our brethren, then,—if only this can be! Life hangs as nothing in the scale against dear Liberty! Though hearts be torn asunder, for Freedom we will fight: Our blood may seal the victory, but God will shield the Right!

Words can bang around in your head Forever, if you let them and you give them room. I used to love poetry, and mostly I still do, Though sometimes “I, too, dislike it.” There must be Something real beyond the fiddle and perfunctory Consolations and the quarrels—as of course There is, though what it is is difficult to say. The salt is on the briar rose, the fog is in the fir trees. I didn’t know what it was, and I don’t know now, But it was what I started out to do, and now, a lifetime later, All I’ve really done. The Opening of the Field, Roots and Branches, Rivers and Mountains : I sat in my room Alone, their fragments shored against the ruin or revelation That was sure to come, breathing in their secret atmosphere, Repeating them until they almost seemed my own. We like to think our lives are what they study to become, And yet so much of life is waiting, waiting on a whim. So much of what we are is sheer coincidence, Like a sentence whose significance is retrospective, Made up out of elementary particles that are in some sense Simply sounds, like syllables that finally settle into place. You probably think that this is a poem about poetry (And obviously it is), yet its real subject is time, For that’s what poetry is—a way to live through time And sometimes, just for a while, to bring it back. *     *     * A paneled dining room in Holder Hall. Stage right, enter twit: “Mr. Ashbery, I’m your biggest campus fan.” We hit it off And talked about “The Skaters” and my preference for “Clepsydra” Vs. “Fragment.” Later on that night John asked me to a party in New York, And Saturday, after dinner and a panel on the artist’s role as something (And a party), driving Lewis’s Austin-Healey through the rain I sealed our friendship with an accident. The party was on Broadway, An apartment (white of course, with paintings) just downstairs From Frank O’Hara’s, who finally wandered down. I talked to him A little about Love Poems (Tentative Title) , which pleased him, And quoted a line from “Poem” about the rain, which seemed to please him too. The party ended, John and I went off to Max’s, ordered steaks And talked about our mothers. All that talking!—poems and paintings, Parents, all those parties, and the age of manifestos still to come! I started coming to New York for lunch. We’d meet at Art News , Walk to Fifty-sixth Street to Larre’s, a restaurant filled with French expatriates, Have martinis and the prix fixe for $2.50 (!), drink rose de Provence And talk (of course) about Genet and James and words like “Coca-Cola.” It was an afternoon in May when John brought up a play That he and Kenneth Koch and Frank O’Hara—Holy Trinity! ( Batman was in vogue)—had started years ago and never finished. There was a dictator named Edgar and some penicillin, But that’s all I remember. They hadn’t actually been together In years, but planned to finish it that night at John’s new apartment On Ninety-fifth Street, and he said to come by for a drink Before they ate and got to work. It was a New York dream Come true: a brownstone floor-through, white and full of paintings (Naturally), “with a good library and record collection.” John had procured a huge steak, and as I helped him set the table The doorbell rang and Frank O’Hara, fresh from the museum And svelte in a hound’s tooth sports coat entered, followed shortly By “excitement-prone Kenneth Koch” in somber gray, And I was one with my immortals. In the small mythologies We make up out of memories and the flow of time A few moments remain frozen, though the feel of them is lost, The feel of talk. It ranged from puns to gossip, always coming back To poems and poets. Frank was fiercely loyal to young poets (Joe Ceravolo’s name came up I think), and when I mentioned Lewis In a way that must have sounded catty, he leapt to his defense, Leaving me to backtrack in embarrassment and have another drink, Which is what everyone had. I think you see where it was going: Conversation drifting into dinner, then I stayed for dinner And everyone forgot about the play, which was never finished (Though I think I’ve seen a fragment of it somewhere). I see a table In a cone of light, but there’s no sound except for Kenneth’s Deadpan “Love to see a boy eat” as I speared a piece of steak; And then the only voice I’m sure I hear is mine, As those moments that had once seemed singular and clear Dissolve into a “general mess of imprecision of feeling” And images, augmented by line breaks. There were phone calls, Other people arrived, the narrative of the night dissolved And finally everyone went home. School and spring wound down. The semester ended, then the weekend that I wrote about in “Sally’s Hair” Arrived and went, and then a late-night cruise around Manhattan for a rich friend’s Parents’ anniversary bash, followed by an Upper East Side preppie bar That left me looking for a place to crash, and so I rang John’s bell at 2 AM And failed (thank God) to rouse him, caught a plane to San Diego The next day, worked at my summer job and worked on poems And started reading Proust, and got a card one afternoon From Peter Schjeldahl telling me that Frank O’Hara had been killed. Ninety-fifth Street soldiered on for several years. I remember a cocktail party (the symposium of those days), Followed by dinner just around the corner at Elaine’s, Pre-Woody Allen. It was there I learned of R.F.K.’s assassination When I woke up on the daybed in the living room, and where John told me getting married would ruin me as a poet (I don’t know why—most of his friends were married), a judgment He revised when he met Susan and inscribed The Double Dream of Spring “If this is all we need fear from spinach, then I don’t mind so much” (Which was probably premature—watering his plants one day She soaked his landlord, Giorgio Cavallon, dozing in the garden below). It was where Peter Delacorte late one night recited an entire side Of a Firesign Theatre album from memory, and set John on that path, To his friends’ subsequent dismay, and where he blessed me with his extra copy Of The Poems , and next day had second thoughts (though I kept it anyway). Sometimes a vague, amorphous stretch of years assumes a shape, And then becomes an age, and then a golden age alive with possibilities, When change was in the air and you could wander through its streets As though through Florence and the Renaissance. I know it sounds ridiculous, But that’s the way life flows: in stages that take form in retrospect, When all the momentary things that occupy the mind from day to day Have vanished into time, and something takes their place that wasn’t there, A sense of freedom—one which gradually slipped away. The center Of the conversation moved downtown, the Renaissance gave way to mannerism As the junior faculty took charge, leaving the emeriti alone and out of it Of course, lying on the fringes, happily awake; but for the rest The laws proscribing what you couldn’t do were clear. I got so tired Of writing all those New York poems (though by then I’d moved to Boston— To Siena, you might say) that led to nowhere but the next one, So I started writing poems about whatever moved me: what it’s like To be alive within a world that holds no place for you, yet seems so beautiful; The feeling of the future, and its disappointments; the trajectory of a life, That always brought me back to time and memory (I’d finished Proust by then), And brings me back to this. John finally moved downtown himself, Into a two-story apartment at Twenty-fifth and Tenth, with a spiral staircase Leading to a library, the locus of the incident of Susan, Alydar and John And the pitcher of water (I’ll draw a veil over it), and Jimmy Schuyler sighing “It’s so beautiful ,” as Bernadette Peters sang “Raining in My Heart” from Dames at Sea . The poetry still continued—mine and everyone’s. I’d added Jimmy To my pantheon (as you’ve probably noticed), but the night in nineteen sixty-six Seemed more and more remote: I never saw Kenneth anymore, And there were new epicenters, with new casts of characters, like Madoo, Bob Dash’s garden in Sagaponack, and Bill and Willy’s loft in Soho. John moved again, to Twenty-second Street, and Susan and I moved to Milwaukee, Where our son was born. I stopped coming to New York, and writing poems, For several years, while I tried to dream enough philosophy for tenure. One afternoon in May I found myself at Ninth and Twenty-second, And as though on cue two people whom I hadn’t seen in years—David Kalstone, Darragh Park—just happened by, and then I took a taxi down to Soho To the loft, and then a gallery to hear Joe Brainard read from I Remember , Back to John’s and out to dinner—as though I’d never been away, Though it was all too clear I had. Poems were in the air, but theory too, And members of the thought police department (who must have also gotten tenure) Turned up everywhere, with arguments that poetry was called upon to prove. It mattered, but in a different way, as though it floated free from poems And wasn’t quite the point. I kept on coming back, as I still do. Half my life was still to come, and yet the rest was mostly personal: I got divorced, and Willy killed himself, and here I am now, ready to retire. There was an obituary in the Times last week for Michael Goldberg, A painter you’ll recall from Frank O’Hara’s poems (“Why I Am Not a Painter,” “Ode to Michael Goldberg (’s Birth and Other Births)”). I didn’t know him, But a few months after the soiree on Ninety-fifth Street I was at a party In his studio on the Bowery, which was still his studio when he died. The New York art world demimonde was there, including nearly everyone Who’s turned up in this poem. I remember staring at a guy who Looked like something from the Black Lagoon, dancing with a gorgeous Woman half his age. That’s my New York: an island dream Of personalities and evenings, nights where poetry was second nature And their lives flowed through it and around it as it gave them life. O brave new world (now old) that had such people in’t! *     *     * “The tiresome old man is telling us his life story.” I guess I am, but that’s what poets do—not always Quite as obviously as this, and usually more by indirection And omission, but beneath the poetry lies the singular reality And unreality of an individual life. I see it as a long, Illuminated tunnel, lined with windows giving on the scenes outside— On Ninety-fifth Street forty years ago. As life goes on You start to get increasingly distracted by your own reflection And the darkness gradually becoming visible at the end. I try not to look too far ahead, but just to stay here— Quick now, here, now, always —only something pulls me Back (as they say) to the day, when poems were more like secrets, With their own vernacular, and you could tell your friends By who and what they read. And now John’s practically become A national treasure, and whenever I look up I think I see him Floating in the sky like the Cheshire Cat. I don’t know What to make of it, but it makes me happy—like seeing Kenneth Just before he died (“I’m going west John, I’m going west”) In his apartment on a side street near Columbia, or remembering Once again that warm spring night in nineteen sixty-six. I like to think of them together once again, at the cocktail party At the end of the mind, where I could blunder in and ruin it one last time. Meanwhile, on a hillside in the driftless region to the west, A few miles from the small town where The Straight Story ends, I’m building a house on a meadow, if I’m permitted to return, Behind a screen of trees above a lower meadow, with some apple trees In which the fog collects on autumn afternoons, and a vista Of an upland pasture without heaviness. I see myself Sitting on the deck and sipping a martini, as I used to at Larre’s, In a future that feels almost like a past I’m positive is there— But where? I think my life is still all conversation, Only now it’s with myself. I can see it continuing forever, Even in my absence, as I close the windows and turn off the lights And it begins to rain. And then we’re there together In the house on the meadow, waiting for whatever’s left to come In what’s become the near future—two versions of myself And of the people that we knew, each one an other To the other, yet both indelibly there: the twit of twenty And the aging child of sixty-two, still separate And searching in the night, listening through the night To the noise of the rain and memories of rain And evenings when we’d wander out into the Renaissance, When I could see you and talk to you and it could still change ; And still there in the morning when the rain has stopped, And the apples are all getting tinted in the cool light.

How like the sky she bends above her child, One with the great horizon of her pain! No sob from our low seas where woe runs wild, No weeping cloud, no momentary rain, Can mar the heaven-high visage of her grief, That frozen anguish, proud, majestic, dumb. She stoops in pity above the labouring earth, Knowing how fond, how brief Is all its hope, past, present, and to come, She stoops in pity, and yearns to assuage its dearth. Through that fair face the whole dark universe Speaks, as a thorn-tree speaks thro’ one white flower; And all those wrenched Promethean souls that curse The gods, but cannot die before their hour, Find utterance in her beauty. That fair head Bows over all earth’s graves. It was her cry Men heard in Rama when the twisted ways With children’s blood ran red. Her silence towers to Silences on high; And, in her face, the whole earth’s anguish prays. It is the pity, the pity of human love That strains her face, upturned to meet the doom, And her deep bosom, like a snow-white dove Frozen upon its nest, ne’er to resume Its happy breathing o’er the golden brace That she must shield till death. Death, death alone Can break the anguished horror of that spell. The sorrow on her face Is sealed: the living flesh is turned to stone; She knows all, all, that Life and Time can tell. Ah, yet, her woman’s love, so vast, so tender, Her woman’s body, hurt by every dart, Braving the thunder, still, still hide the slender Soft frightened child beneath her mighty heart. She is all one mute immortal cry, one brief Infinite pang of such victorious pain That she transcends the heavens and bows them down! The majesty of grief Is hers, and her dominion must remain Eternal. Grief alone can wear that crown.

A Load of brushes and baskets and cradles and chairs Labours along the street in the rain: With it a man, a woman, a pony with whiteybrown hairs. — The man foots in front of the horse with a shambling sway At a slower tread than a funeral train, While to a dirge-like tune he chants his wares, Swinging a Turk's-head brush (in a drum-major's way When the bandsmen march and play). A yard from the back of the man is the whiteybrown pony's nose: He mirrors his master in every item of pace and pose: He stops when the man stops, without being told, And seems to be eased by a pause; too plainly he's old, Indeed, not strength enough shows To steer the disjointed waggon straight, Which wriggles left and right in a rambling line, Deflected thus by its own warp and weight, And pushing the pony with it in each incline. The woman walks on the pavement verge, Parallel to the man: She wears an apron white and wide in span, And carries a like Turk's-head, but more in nursing-wise: Now and then she joins in his dirge, But as if her thoughts were on distant things, The rain clams her apron till it clings. — So, step by step, they move with their merchandize, And nobody buys.

No classes here! Why, that is idle talk. The village beau sneers at the country boor; The importuning mendicants who walk Our cites’ streets despise the parish poor. The daily toiler at some noisy loom Holds back her garments from the kitchen aid. Meanwhile the latter leans upon her broom, Unconscious of the bow the laundress made. The grocer’s daughter eyes the farmer’s lass With haughty glances; and the lawyer’s wife Would pay no visits to the trading class, If policy were not her creed in life. The merchant’s son nods coldly at the clerk; The proud possessor of a pedigree Ignores the youth whose father rose by work; The title-seeking maiden scorns all three. The aristocracy of blood looks down Upon the “nouveau riche”; and in disdain, The lovers of the intellectual frown On both, and worship at the shrine of brain. “No classes here,” the clergyman has said; “We are one family.” Yet see his rage And horror when his favorite son would wed Some pure and pretty player on the stage. It is the vain but natural way Of vaunting our weak selves, our pride, our worth! Not till the long delayed millennial day Shall we behold “no classes” on God’s earth.

(For Gwendolyn Brooks, 1917—2001) maybe there is something about the seventh of June: Gwen, Prince and me . . . or maybe people just have to be born at some time . . . and there are only three hundred sixty-five days or three sixty-six every four years or so . . . meaning that some things happen at the same time in the same rising sign . . . and the same houses in Gemini . . . but some of us might also consider the possibility of reincarnating revolving restructuring that spirit . . . reshaping that spirit . . . releasing that spirit . . . tucking the use- less inside and when the useless pushes out again we restructure again and poetry and song and praisesong go on  . . . because it is the right thing to do we always will cry when a great heart . . . a good soul . . . one of the premier poets of her age restructures . . . reincarnates  . . . revolves into a resolve that we now carry in our hearts . . . as all great women and men are alive . . . not by biology but remem- brance . . . and that’s all right . . . as the old folk say . . . because as long as they stay on the lips . . . they nestle in our hearts and those souls which are planted . . . continue growing . . . until generations not knowing their touch . . . their voice . . . or even the fact that some Chicago poets are terrible cooks . . . but always fun to eat with . . . will tell tales of having met someone who knew someone who once watched a basketball game . . . in which some Chicago poet cheered for Seattle at the request of some Virginia poet who wanted more games . . . while Mr. Blakely was amazed that a Chicago poet was even watching a game . . . and didn’t we miss him as he slipped away watching baseball . . . and what a way to go . . . though we then did sort of know . . . that once gone . . . he would call the woman he loved and so we come to no more phone calls at six a.m. to chat ... and no more Benihana when we are all in New York . . . and no more gossiping and questioning and trying to make sense of a senseless world . . . no more face-to-face . . . only the poetry which is a great monument from this Topeka daughter to the world . . . and yet . . . there can be no complaints in this passing . . . no sorrow songs . . . no if onlys . . . it is all here: the work the love: the woman: who gave and gave and gave . . . no complaints of too long or too hard . . . no injustice of accident or misunderstanding of disease . . . just one great woman moving to the next phase . . . and us on the ground . . . giving Alleluias

I'm just an assistant with the Vanishing Act. My spangled wand points out the disappeared. It's only a poor thing made of words, and lacks the illusive power to light the darkling year. Not prophecy, not elegy, but fact: the thing that's gone is never coming back. Late or soon a guttering silence will ring down a curtain like woven smoke on thickening air. The audience will strain to see what's there, the old magician nowhere to be found. For now, I wear a costume and dance obliquely. The applause you hear is not for me, its rabid sound like angry rain—as one by one the known forms cease to be: childhood, the farm, the river, forested ground; the tiger and the condor, the whale, the honeybee; the village, the book, the lantern. Then you. Then me.