This is a poem for the late Dudley
Fitts, which I wrote just after his funeral in Andover, Mass.
He was a good friend and I admired him on all counts
as a scholar, as a translator, as a poet, as a man.
This is "For Dudley."
"Even when death has taken an exceptional man,
it is common things which touch us,
gathered in the house that proved a hostile.
Though in his desk there lie the half of a sentence
not to be finished by us who lack his gaiety, his Greek,
it is the straight back of a good woman which now we notice.
For her guests hunger, she sets the polished table.
And now the quick sun rounding the gable
picks out a chair, a vase of flowers which
had stood till then in shadow.
It is the light of which Achilles spoke.
Himself a shadow then, recalling the splendor of mere being.
As if we were perceived from a black ship, a small knot
of island folk, the light dwellers pouring a life
to the dark sea, all that we do is touched with ocean,
yet we remain on the shore of what we know.
We say that we are behaving as he would have us--
he who was brave and loved this world,
who did not hold with weeping, yet in the mind,
is in the shut closet where his coats hang in black procession.
There is a covert master.
When he's moved to turn to him--
the exceptional man, telling him all these things
and waiting for the deft lucid answer.
At the sound of that voice is deep specific silence.
The sun winks and fails in the window,
light perpetual keep in."