So this is my imitation of both the Justice and the Vallejo,
I guess.
It's called "In Memory."
"I'll die in Montreal in the wake of winter.
Outside my window, gouts of snow will
topple from the gaunt branches of my favorite maple
toward the dark street where they will turn to water."
Actually, I'm going to start over for a second.
There are two things I want to mention.
It refers at one point to Outremont,
you'll hear the word Outremont, which might not make--
mean anything to most of you.
It's a neighborhood in Montreal where my family and I usually
spend a month in the summer.
My wife is Canadian.
And Durocher is the street that we stay on
and it's in the middle of a major Hasidic Jewish
neighborhood and that figures in the poem.
And I think that's all.
So I'll start over.
"I'll die in Montreal in the wake of winter.
Outside my window gouts of snow will
topple from the gaunt branches of my favorite maple
toward the dark street, where they will turn to water.
Gray little Alps heaved by the snow
plows, skyward, after some storm will
have begun declining exposing like fossils the buried cars.
Deep cleaning will need to be done.
A city will need to be scoured.
I'll die in winter but for now it is summer.
The sidewalk chirps with children.
My grimly formal next door neighbor
in the broad shade of his shtreimel
is off to greet the Sabbath.
He'd look no grimmer, I'd wager, were he
trudging to the gallows.
I'll die some other Friday in thawing weather thinking
perhaps, as I am now, of my father
and his long loneliness propped on thick pillows.
I'll die as the Hasidism who wear
like blazon each different from their neighbors who are sinful.
Parade down Durocher in black, not mournful,
for what was I to them.
Through all those seasons they never did acknowledge me.
Our manners clashed like our clothing
when we passed on sidewalks.
They stared ahead.
I smiled at wigs, at side locks.
Yet let them figure, here in these lines as mourners.
Geoffrey Brock, a native of Southern Climes
has died in a cold country far from his people.
A minor poet known among friends for his supple use
of outmoded forms and his quaint rhymes.
He leaves a wife and children who--
and so on.
And now he's gone from Outremont forever.
Don't bother praying he was no believer
and isn't bound for any heaven or Zion.
It's all the same to him if you wed his widow
and fill the vague depression left in his mattress or flirted
[INAUDIBLE] with his favorite waitress.
Soon even in memory he will cast no shadow."