Mornings Sylvia and Anne go to your class,
Sylvia, fresh and giggling as Ophelia, already
published. It is something like the High Mass
of poetry, I imagine. Outside the window Valéry
dips ghost-oars in the Charles, but only you
have eyes for him, as yet, and you aren't peering
beyond windows much just now: there are few
who ever do. Perhaps Anne hears speaking,
a voice like the rustling of wizened leaves,
and looks perplexed. Another pauses upon
the cusp of November, before the peaceful fog,
and almost prays, as the bow first cleaves:
Je veux à larges coups rompre l'illustre monde
de feuilles et de fue que je chante tout bas.

Paul Valéry: Le Rameur

II. In Memoriam Seram

...they fell bemused
at various unfulfillments...

William Meredith

To take Cal for a nickname was pure genius.
It was so daunting that even William, who one summer
wore only one sandal to every lecture, informed us
that he was going to read au travers de la mar,
in Boston, with Robert Lowell; spoke of you,
even when he spoke of you at table, as Lowell
-- even then lowered his eyes as if two were two
syllables too few. And it was no small trouble
you soon died and he had to consider just homage,
(the Lowells, they say, speak only to the Lodges,
and the Lodges only to God,) or that I was indiscreet
and mused to friends that passengers might feel rage,
or fear, but never were bemused, as the clutches
of gravity hurled them beyond all strophe or poetry.

III. Thanksgiving Day:

The Approximation of Closure

It was the year you went on lithium carbonate
and began an age; still here and there a line
reminds me of you, shedding off its weight
and rising swiftly until the air goes fine
with late afternoon November gold. We need
courses in life and death and what's alive;
trips to the hospital, you wrote. We leap
now only before we have learned to walk: I've
long since forgiven the implications of you --
those of my father. There's even a passion to it,
of a sort: this quoting pill-bottle labels
and flyleaf dedications, this rush to eschew
themes and gigantism, the unpretentious Obit,
the dock-siders and pressed rayon chasubles.

IV. Obiter Solem

Before the final coming to rest, comes rest
Of all transcendence in a mode of being...

Robert Lowell

In the field, up the street, the new warriors
adjust helmets, straps, shoulder-pads;
each damosel picks out the number of hers:
its the stuff of legend and as new as fads
of teased hair; I've been to your country and seen
the same there. For one bright moment, then,
the fifty years will never pass: will seem
the illusion; its once we've lost belief in them --
our illusions -- the calendar of days begins.
The sun behind Cape Cod cranberry bog
threatens chill and strange, stark tree-bole
blaze up through branches expedient with the sins
that gnarl the bone: the year near gone, and God,
at last they are invested all with gold.

V. Thanksgiving Night at the Dunkin Donuts

Lorraine and Lee have left me a plate,
with all the trimmings, at the Dunkin Donuts:
a gift for Thanksgiving Day. I contemplate
less the food than the fine drunkenness
of this solitude. The brief November sun sets
in a flame of acetylene-blue like the world become
a salvation of scotch neat and flotsam sonnets.
Mari-Lynn and Brian have stopped, on the way home,
to say a quick Hello -- seek topics gingerly.
In the distance is the muted sound of an ambulance
as the two of them describe a hockey-game
they saw last week. I think of you desultorily:
your picture on the Selected Poems; mid-sentence
you look up as unaffectedly as the sane.