Notes About The Poem
Richard Wilbur died at age 96 on Oct. 14, 2017.
I found him on November 3rd.
(This in my series on/for/from/to/through dead poets.)
Richard Wilbur
I found Richard today -
November the Third.
Isn’t that just like Richard?
I don’t know.
I can’t say.
He died a fortnight-plus ago.
I never knew him.
I never gave him time.
To know me.
To show me.
How to know me.
And by him, through me,
perhaps to know him.
And you.
He is no longer a Thing of This World.
Our second laureate,
my latest regret.
And I’m late to even this: coming to regret
my being late to come to him.
To come to his.
And now it's come to this.
It’s come to he’s gone.
I’m settled into the far-back;
into a window seat,
of my own making
on a love airline,
not of my own making -
or buying.
Though, its true, we don’t buy our seats.
We lease our place.
And when another pays
the costs are borne by all,
all the same.
Everyone pays for their place,
And their time in their place.
I finally sorted my self into a sort of place -
this seat; but also this head-space to write
to Richard.
I’ve no connection to the far below world,
despite the gregarious partygoers strewn all around
the nearby seats.
I’m thirty-three thousand feet up and I’m up above the Sandia
which is another mile up.
So, call it 40 K.
No signal and its days after I began this poem,
which was begun a remorseful dozen few years
after I might’ve opened myself to whatever this
obit. writer wrote. What he lent the world.
No, what he gave. He lent the world his place in it.
He left his poetry. A sole Lasting in the Everlasting
Never Lasts. Nothing Lasts, they say.
So, now that I am ready (Itself an insult to the man.)
I fly, in joy, through skies and find I am yet again
Unready. Remorse is the microscopic stress fracture in
the airplane wing.
Enough distance, enough disconnect, enough stress.
and the Whole Thing comes apart.
I already regret what I never once met.
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