A selection in honor of William Merediths 85th Birthday Original etchings by Stoimen Stiolov Edited by Richard Harteis Copyright © 2004 by Richard Harteis All poems reprinted by permission of the author. Grateful acknowledgment is made to W.W. Norton where the following poems have appeared: Rita Dove, The Ants of Argos; Maxine Kumin, Hard Frost: On a Line from Hopkins; Stanley Kunitz, Touch Me;Linda Pastan, IN ANOTHER COUNTRY: Cernobbio, Sunday Morning; Ellen Voigt, EFFORT AT SPEECH, For William Meredith; Elizabeth Spires, Something Happens; Adrienne Rich, Seven Skins. The following poems first appeared in the New Yorker: Richard Wilbur, Asides; Rosanna Warren, V; W.S.Merwin, To Zbigniew Herberts Bicycle; Josephine Jacobsen, Old Mr. Forrester. William Jay Smiths poem, A Pavane for the Nursery was first published in THE WORLD BELOW THE WINDOW:Poems 1937-1997 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Edward Weismillers poem Walking Toward the Sun first appeared in the collection of that title published by Yale University Press. Daniel Hoffmans poem, The Poem first appeared in BEYOND THE SILENCE: SELECTED SHORTER POEMS 1948-2003, published by L.S.U. Press. ISBN: 1-58776-148-3 All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Cover art: Stoimen Stoilov etching for Tempus Fugit by Richard Harteis A division of NetPub Corporation 675 Dutchess Turnpike, Poughkeepsie, NY 12603 www.vivisphere.com (800) 724-1100 Brueghel in Naples About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters..... W.H. Auden Ovid would never have guessed how far and Fathers notion about wax melting, bah! Its ice up there. Freezing. Soaring and swooping over solitary altitudes I was breezing along (a record I should think) when my wings began to molt not melt. These days, workmanship, I ask you. Appalling. Theres a mountain down there on fire and Im falling, falling away from it. Phew, the suns on the horizon or am I upside down? Great Bacchus, the sea is rearing up. Will I drown? My white legs the last to disappear? (I have no trousers on.) A little to the left the ploughman, a little to the right a galleon, a sailor climbing the rigging, a fisherman casting his line, and now I hear a shepherds dog barking. Im that near. Lest I leave no trace but a few scattered feathers on the water show me your face, sailor, look up, fisherman, look this way, shepherd, turn around, ploughman. Raise the alarm! Launch a boat! 1 My luck. Im seen only by a jackass of an artist interested in composition, in the green tinge of the sea, in the aesthetics of disaster not in me. Dannie Abse 2 The Selfishness Of The Poetry Reader Sometimes I think Im the only man in America who reads poems and who walks at night in the suburbs, calling the moon names. And Im certain Im the single man who owns a house with bookshelves, who drives to work without a CD player, taking the long way, by the ocean breakers. No one else, in all America, quotes William Meredith verbatim, cites Lowell over ham and eggs, and Levertov; keeps Antiworlds and Ariel beside his bed. Sometimes I think no other man alive is changed by poetry, has fought as utterly as I have over Sunday Morning and vowed to love those difficult as Pound. No one else has seen a luna moth flutter over Iowa, or watched a womans hand lift rainbow trout from water, and snow fall onto Minnesota farms. This country wide, Im the only man who spends his money recklessly on thin volumes unreviewed, enjoys the long appraising look of check-out girls. How could another in America know why 3 the laundry from a window laughs, and how plums taste, and what an auto wreck feels likeand craft? I think that Im the only man who speaks of fur and limestone in one clotted breath; for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm; who cant stop quoting haikus at some weekend guest. The only man, in all America, who feeds on something darker than his politics, who writes in margins and who earmarks pages in all America, I am the only man. Dick Allen 4 Ink Years I served the Oracle of Delphi, preparing her ink, guarding her gate, that only one at a time basked in the light of those answers. Ah, but the ink fell to me. I painted her words prophetic, enigmatic, always terse and what did she command but make me swear to burn those scrolls. I dreamed of casting that wisdom into the temple well, awoke, heart pounding, slipped snippets of the scrolls into capsules, then flung them with birds into the fiery sunset. Karren L. Alenier 5 Two masks unearthed in bulgaria 6