A selection in honor of
William Meredith’s 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 Herbert’s Bicycle”; Josephine Jacobsen, “Old Mr.
Forrester.” William Jay Smith’s poem, “ A Pavane for the Nursery” was first published in THE WORLD BELOW THE WINDOW:Poems 1937-1997 by Johns Hopkins
University Press. Edward Weismiller’s poem “Walking Toward the Sun” first appeared in the collection of that title published by Yale University Press. Daniel
Hoffman’s 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
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Brueghel in Naples
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters..... W.H. Auden
Ovid would never have guessed how far
and Father’s notion about wax melting, bah!
It’s 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.
There’s a mountain down there on fire
and I’m falling, falling away from it.
Phew, the sun’s 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 shepherd’s dog barking.
I’m 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. I’m 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 I’m the only man in America
who reads poems
and who walks at night in the suburbs,
calling the moon names.
And I’m certain I’m 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 woman’s hand lift rainbow trout from water,
and snow fall onto Minnesota farms.
This country wide, I’m 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 like—and craft?
I think that I’m the only man who speaks
of fur and limestone in one clotted breath;
for whom Anne Sexton plunged in Grimm; who can’t
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