M A R G I E  The American Journal of Poetry     www.margiereview.com

Published Annually in the Fall                                     MARGIE  P. O. BOX 250, CHESTERFIELD, MO 63006-0250

1

Glowing, animated, the faces of the women and men seated

at one of seven round marble tables moved closer as if to whisper

a kiss without burning their lips on the candle in the center.

How did the Yorkshire born San Franciscan hear

about the restaurant on the block where my wife and I first lived

until the landlord’s hired arsonist set our tenement on fire?

“I gathered that,” he remarked

about the twenty year old conflagration. 

2

An uncanny pact Thom had with the uncanny.

I said I admired his midnight blue jacket and he, that he admired

mine. "It takes a long time to find the right one.”

“A poet," Thom went on, in the conspiratorial tone

loved by practitioners of the secret and

secretive arts, like spies and poets, “needs one jacket, just one.

The jacket: almost black with off white dapples to offset

any severity implied by

his signature jeans and motorcycle boots.

“You’re probably like me,” Thom added, “and don’t own a suit.”

3

Now how can two men, with a twenty

year age differential, different sexual persuasion,

who now live on opposite coasts and were born

across the ocean,

understand each other and share so many judgments?

Reading each other’s books counted for something,

though mine required slender shelf space at the time.

What would he have said if I’d thought against myself this way:

“I don’t feel comfortable writing lines that follow

an a,b,c,d, kind of progression;

the impulse came in a flash and I got that down,

but since I feel inadequate to the task.”

“You set yourself.”  He was amused

by my swaying between conviction

and trembling with regard to obstacles

I had set in my own path, but must have known

that a fresh take, a new approach for you that’s old

to others, can be tough. 

So can channeling one

as elusive as he was direct,

like Skelton, Wyatt, and Burns.

4

“And then there’s he who dogs our footsteps, if

you ever…get the urge again…to translate

a Greek play, (I began to shake my head to get in

my “no” in advance,) I want you to nail Philoctetes.”

Gunnslang for direct but not obvioius.

“That’s one play where no one hedges,

everything’s set out and on the line,

the way it is in Skelton, Burns, Wyatt.”

“But the hero’s so vulnerable.”

“That keeps it from being boring.”

“The bow.  When the child asks if he can touch it.”

“Just to get to where he say’s that it’s worth doing.”

“I’ll get a migraine like I did when ‘unpacking’

the Greek when the scholars touched on all that was going

on in one little speech by the messenger.”

“I didn’t know you got headaches…or migraines.”

“I don’t.  Unless yoked to someone else’s unbudgeable

conception of how anything that requires

imagination should be done.”

So much gone we cannot do without.

5

I wish he’d repeat the same injunction and apply it to

the Paradiso, whose first six lines I had reason to rework,

because other versions repeated what Dante said not

what he was getting at.

A balance in the way the prime mover distributes

the crepuscular in that valley and sheer radiance over here

where I fall upward toward the light, undiluted, blinding,

yet glimmerings signal what he  who comes down from the heights,

intellect rattled, speech impeded, can still see:

even in paradise—the closer we get to where we want to go the more

the mind’s capacities are drawn down—

the  ravine bottomless, profound, still unknown as now

divests itself of what it had taken for its own.

Thom liked the idea of the periphery

and pushing through any barrier until the material

was exhausted.  The Elizabethan route has a flip

side to the anthologized lyrics, the chaos stirred

by the play I reread just yesterday in listless heatstricken

New York City, The Winter’s Tale; all metamorphosis.

Comes back the terseness of Thom’s Ariadne in After Ovid.

How rare in my experience, an artist who doesn’t want

others to forge themselves in his image. 

That would be forgery.

If more people than we’ve ever considered are tuned in

to the same thoughts at the same time then why doesn’t everyone

feel less alone than they do?  The acuteness

of Thom’s vanishing doesn’t get duller with the passing of the days.

A man, then in his mid-sixties, spry and as young in spirit

as anyone I've met.  If I didn’t say I miss him a bit

every day I’d be in league with the ax-destined Raleigh,

not to link that “lie” with “The Lie,” which he loved

as he did Wyatt’s “In Mourning Wise”

for its lack of mendacity. 

Thom had a high-pitched laugh for a man whose face

in the photographs had a cruel and inscrutable cast, like Bond. 

“There are fewer people with whom I can really laugh.”

Two years later, a Collected Gunn—minus his sparse

take on Elvis I had used to get the young

to get into Gunn—“oh I cut that at the last minute,”—

and when the Academy issued Thom its formal invitation

to read from the book they gave him carte blanche vis a vis

introductions,  he requested me to execute the task.

Deep pleasure to uncover a dozen uncollected, overlooked, 

poems longer than we associate with Gunn,

some steered away from by anthologists

who go by what others have gone by.  To risk

a judgment could cause a crack up. 

“Critics as well rarely can tell if a poem

is really a poem, but if it’s been approved,

like everyone’s poem about an animal,

they can tell you what it means.”

The wry deliver made us laugh until we coughed,

a little ashamed: it wasn’t that funny.

But it triggered the next round of laughter.

When these drear subjects arose Thom had an answer:

“They don’t know what a poem is.”

“Then why…?”

“That’s academia.”

“But they don’t get away with anything.”

“It is academic.  Isn’t it?  The poems, not

the poets, they haven’t heard of would make up

a real anthology: I hadn’t seen “In Mourning Wise”

reprinted until I reviewed Emyrs Jones  

in the TLS.” 

I know, I thought, and now I think

maybe I ought to resubscribe…

It never entered the realm of possibility

that this could be his last live event in New York City,

not after he’d tended the beds of the men with the night sweats

while staying free of the disease.

If “desire is death” denial is its other side.

The tension in the instant: sheer existence.

You ask what I’ve learned since your death.

My answer: that only through learning

how to mourn can we begin to live.

In mourning wise and wisdom through mourning.

This isn’t goodbye Thom, dead a decade by now.

It’s hello.