Your Death, dressed like the good Gray Poet
Still leaned over your shoulder

The music stares to fade. And you’ll be gone
before I write the lines you asked me for.

O little men who mock his macho enterprise!

His years line up there in receding ranks
Like so many doubting Thomases.

a tall one, but she sang Delilah well;
she could stand up to the Philistines or Placido like anything.

To be one with earth and sky. You ate and went
Immortal, one of the cloudy sages of air;

for a man who writes about
loneliness so much
his poems are full of people.

They want one of every kind and they
can’t help it, it’s an addiction,

Under the lavender foam of cirrus, swallows
Looped; beyond trees, the pavement whined.

Yearning was fuel; yet the white-out buried the climber,
His possessions, chalcolithic gear.