It certainly couldn't just before this at home.
Again, a necessary memorialized in poems essays
in respect of German readers.
I think the thing most dramatic about being
this age is that one--
I think the sense of young is that it will be one's own life.
Gee, I may die.
And not to say that that's to be taken lightly,
but it can certainly take care of itself.
The--
[LAUGHTER]
--of death is the death of France and thus
to those who locate you.
Until one day, you recognize there's
no one left on Earth who remembers the world is
as I know it not to make it, but no one
can share it any longer than that--
in that common information.
And there's nothing at all that holds
who cares or isn't contemptuous of one's life,
it's just hey, that must have been nice then.
[LAUGHTER]
So I've had all falls, people generously asking
what were you doing?
Oh, grief.
I was frankly out a great deal on memorials.
I mean, I almost became unwittingly
a kind of professional mourner, which is kind of cold.
Then John, the same time, other friends were sadly dying,
I mean at this age people died.
So "For John Weiners."
"Glass roses or something else, hardly expected
an abundance of goodwill, a kind hand in usual troubles.
Do you hear the voices all around
you, a sort of whispering, echoing silence as if someone
had left the window open?
Reading those several times with John,
we were first in a Great Hall, the Y uptown where he said,
he heard Auden read, and now we did.
The great velvet curtains, the useful sense
of a company in the same place we now stood echoing.
Then at Bard, first time I'd met Tom Meyer,
still a student and we, John, Bobby,
and me had driven up from New York together.
In bleak aftermath of Olson's telling
John he was going off with Panna,
on the phone in the Chelsea the blasted
heath we were leaving behind.
Sweet, you might say impeccable gentleman like Claude Rains,
his Boston accent held each word a particular obligation
and value.
I see his face as still a young man in San Francisco,
hearing him talking with Joanne, hearing him talk with Joe Dunn,
with friends.
When you are a poet as he was have no confusions,
you write the words you are given to,
you are possessed or protected by a vision.
We are not going anywhere, we are somewhere here
where John is where he's brought us much as he might
himself this evening to listen.
I think of all the impossible loves of my life,
all the edges of feeling, all the helpless reach to others
one tried so bitterly to effect, to reach as one
might a hilltop, an edge of the sea where the waves can
break at last on the shore.
I think of just jumping into darkness, into deep water.
Into nothing one can ever point to as a place out
there, just its shadow, a beckoning echo of something,
the premonition, which does not warn, but invites.
There is music in pain, but not because of it.
Love in each persistent breath.
He was the light of the world, a lit match or the whole city,
burning.