For Howard Moss
Already six years past your age!
The steps in Rome,
the house near Hampstead Heath,
& all your fears
that you might cease to be
before your pen had glean'd. . . .
My dear dead friend,
you were the first to teach me
how the dust could sing.
I followed in your footsteps
up the Heath.
I listened hard
for Lethe's nightingale.
& now at 31, I want to live.
Oblivion holds no adolescent charms.
& all the 'souls of poets
dead & gone,'
& all the 'Bards
of Passion & Mirth'
cannot make death-
its echo, its damp earth-
resemble birth.
You died in Rome-
in faltering sunlight-
Bernini's watery boat still sinking
in the fountain in the square below.
When Severn came to say
the roses bloomed,
you did not 'glut thy sorrow,'
but you wept-
you wept for them
& for your posthumous life.
& yet we all lead posthumous lives somehow.
The broken lyre,
the broken lung,
the broken love.
Our names are writ in newsprint
if not water.
'Don't breathe on me-' you cried,
'it comes like ice.'
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Last words.
(I can't imagine mine.
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poem by Erica Jong
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