OF DR. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
For Sandy Ives
I am glad I did not read of his death
until after a friend telephoned
from another country
and told me, drunkenly:
"The old man is dead
and I wanted to talk
to someone who would understand."
I am glad, too, I was drunk enough
that the two of us could sit,
side by side, on the cross bar of a telephone pole
midway between
Orono, Maine and Hartland, New Brunswick,
dangle our feet in the sky
and drink to the memory
of an old man who took too long to die
because he had never learned
how the trick was done.
