Envoi

1919 –

2007

Go, little book. If anybody asks
Why I add poems to a time like this,
Tell how the comeliness I can't take in
Of ships and other figures of content
Compels me still until I give them names;
And how I give them names impatiently,
As who should pull up roses by the roots
That keep him turning on his empty bed,
The smell intolerable and thick with loss.

Reprinted from Effort at Speech: New and Selected Poems by William Meredith, published by Triquarterly Books/Northwestern University Press in 1997. Copyright (c) 1997 by William Meredith. All rights reserved; used by permission of Northwestern University Press and the author.

Going abruptly into a starry night It is ignorance we blink from, dark, unhoused; There is a gaze of animal delight Before the human vision. Then, aroused To nebulous danger, we may look for easy stars, Orion and the Dipper; but they are not ours, These learned fields. Dark and ignorant, Unable to see here what our forebears saw, We keep some fear of random firmament Vestigial in us. And we think, Ah, If I had lived then, when these stories were made up, I Could have found more likely pictures in haphazard sky. But this is not so.

Touching your goodness, I am like a man Who turns a letter over in his hand And you might think this was because the hand was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man Has never had a letter from anyone; And now he is both afraid of what it means And ashamed because he has no other means To find out what it says than to ask someone. His uncle could have left the farm to him, Or his parents died before he sent them word, Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved. Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him. What would you call his feeling for the words That keep him rich and orphaned

For Robert Lowell I In the tunnel of woods, as the road Winds up through the freckled light, a porcupine, Larger than life, crosses the road. He moves with the difficulty of relics— Possum, armadillo, horseshoe crab. To us they seem creatures arthritic with time, Winding joylessly down like burnt-out galaxies. In all their slowness we see no dignity, Only a want of scale. Having crossed the road oblivious, he falls off Deliberately and without grace into the ferns. II In another state are hills as choppy as lake water And, on a hillside there, Is a junkyard of

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Envoi

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Envoi

More by this poet

Starlight

The Illiterate

Last Things

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