Bill Sweeney

His last composed poem, "Over My Head," closes with the evening tide coming in as the light fails over Brighton Beach. In the years of The Great Plague, he lived with his mother and brother and wrote the Elegies that remain unpublished, under the eaves in an unfinished room above his mother's late-night television vigil. He wrote to a ghostly laugh-track in the night. Though he cut out and saved lurid, five-color magazine pictures of The South Pacific, The Aegean; though he hoped for a winter crossing by steamer until his final weakness set in, underneath he was a city boy whose poems drifted like a dinghy in small inlets—Gravesend, Rockaway— out too far for safety, in sight of land.