Closings

1 “Always Be Closing,” Liam told us— abc of real estate, used cars, and poetry. Liam the dandy loved Brooks Brothers shirts, double-breasted suits, bespoke shoes, and linen jackets. On the day Liam and Tree married in our backyard, Liam and I wore Chuck’s burgundy boho-prep high-tops that Liam bought on Fifth Avenue. 2 When the rain started, we moved indoors and Liam read a Quartet aloud. T.S. Eliot turned old and frail at sixty, pale, preparing for death. Then poets of new generations died—Frank O’Hara first, then Jim Wright with throat cancer in a Bronx hospice, Sylvia Plath beside the oven, Thom Gunn of an overdose, Denise 3 Levertov, Bob Creeley, Jane Kenyon... In a New York bar, Liam told me eccentric, affectionate stories about a road trip in Tree’s country of Montana, and the joy they felt in the abundance of their marriage. At Bennington Tree said, “Fourteen years after the wedding in your backyard, I love Liam with my entire heart.” 4 Liam’s face changed quickly as he spoke, eyes and mouth erupting with gusto as he improvised his outrageous, cheerful, inventive obscenities. When I first met him—I expounded at a young poet’s do—his bearded face was handsome and expressionless. He would not defer to a poet fifty years old! After a few months 5 he was revising my lines for me, making the metaphors I couldn’t. Even now, working at poems, I imagine for a moment Liam disassembling them. A year ago he watched the progress of age turn me skeletal, pale flesh hanging loosely in folds from my arms, and thin rib-bones like grates above a sagging belly. 6 His body would never resemble my body. Four or five times a week we wrote letters back and forth, talking about class structure, about how Tree took charge over the Academy of American Poets, about poems and new attacks on free speech... When I won a notorious prize, Liam sent me eighty-one notions 7 about projects I might undertake. Number fifty-six instructed me: “Urge poets to commit suicide.” His whole life he spoke of suicide lightly, when he wasn’t preserving the First Amendment from Jesse Helms, or enduring two colon cancers, or watching films, or chatting with Tree, or undergoing heart surgeries. 8 If he walked their dog Keeper one block, he had to take nitroglycerin. When Jane was dying, Liam and Tree drove up to say goodbye. I wheelchaired Jane to a pile of books by her chair to find the color plate of Caillebotte’s shadowy kitchen garden at Yerres for the jacket of Otherwise, when Tree would design it. I think of Jane’s 9 horror if she were alive to know that on August fifteenth Liam pulled the shotgun’s trigger. The night before, wearing a tux over a yellow silk shirt, he danced with Tree once again, before bed and the morning’s murder. He left Tree alone and desolate but without anger. Tree knew Liam did what he planned and needed to do.