I that all through my early days
I remember well was always
the youngest of the company
save for one sister after me
from the time when I was able
to walk under the dinner table
and be punished for that promptly
because its leaves could fall on me
father and mother overhead
who they talked with and what they said
were mostly clouds that knew already
directions far too old for me
at school I skipped a grade so that
whatever I did after that
each year everyone would be
older and hold it up to me
at college many of my friends
were returning veterans
equipped with an authority
I admired and they treated me
as the kid some years below them
so I married half to show them
and listened with new vanity
when I heard it said of me
how young I was and what a shock
I was the youngest on the block
I thought I had it coming to me
and I believe it mattered to me
and seemed my own and there to stay
for a while then came the day
I was in another country
other older friends around me
my youth by then taken for granted
and found that it had been supplanted
the notes in some anthology
listed persons born after me
how long had that been going on
how could I be not quite so young
and not notice and nobody
even bother to inform me
though my fond hopes were taking longer
than I had hoped when I was younger
a phrase that came more frequently
to suggest itself to me
but the secret was still there
safe in the unprotected air
that breath that in its own words only
sang when I was a child to me
and caught me helpless to convey it
with nothing but the words to say it
though it was those words completely
and they rang it was clear to me
with a changeless overtone
I have listened for since then
hearing that note endlessly
vary every time beyond me
trying to find where it comes from
and to what words it may come
and forever after be
present for the thought kept at me
that my mother and every day
of our lives would slip away
like the summer and suddenly
all would have been taken from me
but that presence I had known
sometimes in words would not be gone
and if it spoke even once for me
it would stay there and be me
however few might choose those words
for listening to afterwards
there I would be awake to see
a world that looked unchanged to me
I suppose that was what I thought
young as I was then and that note
sang from the words of somebody
in my twenties I looked around me
to all the poets who were then
living and whose lines had been
sustenance and company
and a light for years to me
I found the portraits of their faces
first in the rows of oval spaces
in Oscar Williams’ Treasury
so they were settled long before me
and they would always be the same
in that distance of their fame
affixed in immortality
during their lifetimes while around me
all was woods seen from a train
no sooner glimpsed than gone again
but those immortals constantly
in some measure reassured me
then first there was Dylan Thomas
from the White Horse taken from us
to the brick wall I woke to see
for years across the street from me
then word of the death of Stevens
brought a new knowledge of silence
the nothing not there finally
the sparrow saying Be thou me
how long his long auroras had
played on the darkness overhead
since I looked up from my Shelley
and Arrowsmith first showed him to me
and not long from his death until
Edwin Muir had fallen still
that fine bell of the latter day
not well heard yet it seems to me
Sylvia Plath then took her own
direction into the unknown
from her last stars and poetry
in the house a few blocks from me
Williams a little afterwards
was carried off by the black rapids
that flowed through Paterson as he
said and their rushing sound is in me
that was the time that gathered Frost
into the dark where he was lost
to us but from too far to see
his voice keeps coming back to me
then the sudden news that Ted
Roethke had been found floating dead
in someone’s pool at night but he
still rises from his lines for me
and on the rimless wheel in turn
Eliot spun and Jarrell was borne
off by a car who had loved to see
the racetrack then there came to me
one day the knocking at the garden
door and the news that Berryman
from the bridge had leapt who twenty
years before had quoted to me
the passage where a jest wrote Crane
falls from the speechless caravan
with a wave to bones and Henry
and to all that he had told me
I dreamed that Auden sat up in bed
but I could not catch what he said
by that time he was already
dead someone next morning told me
and Marianne Moore entered the ark
Pound would say no more from the dark
who once had helped to set me free
I thought of the prose around me
and David Jones would rest until
the turn of time under the hill
but from the sleep of Arthur he
wakes an echo that follows me
Lowell thought the shadow skyline
coming toward him was Manhattan
but it blacked out in the taxi
once he read his Notebook to me
at the number he had uttered
to the driver a last word
then that watchful and most lonely
wanderer whose words went with me
everywhere Elizabeth
Bishop lay alone in death
they were leaving the party early
our elders it came home to me
but the needle moved among us
taking always by surprise
flicking by too fast to see
to touch a friend born after me
and James Wright by his darkened
river heard the night heron pass over
took his candle down the frosty
road and disappeared before me
Howard Moss had felt the gnawing
at his name and found that nothing
made it better he was funny
even so about it to me
Graves in his nineties lost the score
forgot that he had died before
found his way back innocently
who once had been a guide to me
Nemerov sadder than his verse
said a new year could not be worse
then the black flukes of agony
went down leaving the words with me
Stafford watched his hand catch the light
seeing that it was time to write
a memento of their story
signed and is a plain before me
now Jimmy Merrill’s voice is heard
like an aria afterward
and we know he will never be
old after all who spoke to me
on the cold street that last evening
of his heart that leapt at finding
some yet unknown poetry
then waved through the window to me
in that city we were born in
one by one they have all gone
out of the time and language we
had in common which have brought me
to this season after them
the best words did not keep them from
leaving themselves finally
as this day is going from me
and the clear note they were hearing
never promised anything
but the true sound of brevity
that will go on after me
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