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 its 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 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. 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.