In Memoriam
1935 - 2020
Dear Friends, Family, Poets, Professors,
It is with tremendous sadness that we write to let you know that our father died in the early morning of April 25th, suddenly but peacefully. He had recently been diagnosed with pneumonia, although he seemed to be feeling better. When we talked to him the day before, he was tired but in good spirits. As many of you know, our father’s prodigious memory had been failing him for some years, and the heaviness of his life seemed to have outweighed his many joys—reading and writing poetry, watching sports, playing guitar, railing against any number of outrages, but especially those involving miscarriages of justice or poetics. The only joy that never diminished for him was the intense love and abiding affection he felt for (and from) his intimate friends and his family and his love of words and all they could do. In this sense, his death at 85 is not a tragedy, but it is a heartbreaking loss for those of us who loved him. We have been thinking a lot about the rich and artistic life he created for himself despite an emotionally and economically impoverished childhood. He was a beautiful and masterful poet, a consummate teacher, a loyal friend, a tender man, and a wonderful father and grandfather. He loved us, our sister Evie, Teel and Matt, and especially his grandchildren—Jake, Julien, Jack, and Lucy—with a love that outpaced even his formidable vocabulary.
With love, Naomi & Judah
Our father spent most of his lifetime arguing with our mother about what happens to us after we die. This unpublished poem to her, “To a Believer in Two Moods,” seems particularly fitting.
To a Believer in Two Moods
Another Day
It's Hallowe'en again-ooh, very scary,
Come face to face once more with the abyss,
Which waits for all, the wary and unwary,
Believer and infidel. For you, I know,
There's nothing at all scary about this.
There's no abyss, no nether world, no end,
Only an interval, a gathering round,
A sort of tiring-house from which we go
—To what? Ah, here my imagination fails me.
With or without wings? naked? shrouded? gowned?
Or disembodied consciousness? Not mine:
Mine is composed of earth and the things of earth
And every atom in my body tells me
Spirit and matter are one, and will decline
Together back to the darkness before birth;
I will cease to be I, I will not know
Even the instant when my remnants meet
Blessed oblivion, infinitely forgiving,
Perpetual peace and silence and complete
Absence of pain. Now that's what I call living.
Uluru, 2007
Breathtaken at the foot of Uluru,
Wondering what to make of this strange land
Beyond a wild surmise, I thought of you,
Who would have found some way to understand
The speechless power of this vast red stone
And, as far as the eye can see, a flat red sand,
And might have heard in the dawn wind a tone
Of sorrow that will never fade away—
A sorrow it could scarcely call its own.
My disbelief has nothing more to say.
I have no heart for making light of you.
If I believed in prayer, I would pray
You make your way at last to Uluru,
And everything that you believe be true.