On the deck, before the dawn chorus, I rise to write and to imagine all the knowledge stacked and shelved in the minds of scholars now dead—the facts I’d give my life to know, the facts they gave their lifetimes to acquire. The men and women who lived as if books mattered, as if Tolstoy, Goethe, Balzac, the others, gave a special solace not found elsewhere, as if a multitude might go comfortless of nouns without the “thumb” and “fist” and “pastry” of their mother tongue, without the husk of a book from their hazy grand uncles’ libraries.

The uncles have vanished now, their language gone, gone the desire for dialect, patois, the je n’sais quoi that set the aunts at their escritoire in the morning to write their thousand letters, most all of them lost because we who came after didn’t understand the difference between culture and wisdom, between be and do. Or perhaps we lost our belief in the power of language except as twisted to the uses of propaganda. Even as I live past the post-war flush when the nation forgot how to read in the radium light from the blown up desert, forgot how to write because phones talked to us and answered us and TVs took our collective eyesight, live into the time when trunks of books went only to the junk dealers and thrift shop still the people I love best are writers are artists and scientists in love with language and still I rise to the world and to write before the woods stir. I don’t need to believe. I read and write and I only sometimes wonder why.
 

This has been quite a season for loss. Natalie Cole, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, Harper Lee, Pat Conroy, George Martin, Merle Haggard, Patty Duke, Grizzly Adams, one of the Mondavis, one of the Eagles and more—all dead so far in 2016. And since death is often, if not always, on poets’ minds, I offer a poem from my first book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, on just that subject.

Seasonal Losses
 
Passing last summer’s weathered hay,
the tires splash on blacktop as fall rain shingles off
an umbrella, weeps from the cupola,
makes a cool counterpoint to the zealous
 
blooming in my friend’s head, the malady
that sets a milk carton on a lit stove,
shuffles into the garden, naked as a rosebush. 
It won’t be long now.
 
The dead this fall—their absolute numbers--
heavier than I thought, than brush
piled against the fence, their particular faces
reduced to one skeletal face, as all that was
 
supple, extra is pared away until their passing
requires only someone to sit and watch
the scant twist of flesh from which inclination departs.
 
Driving into the fast-growing tumor of the city,
winter rye sprouting in the sidewalk cracks, a quick
explosion of chill shucked knees and elbows,
 
I leave behind remaindered dirt--
beyond recognition, all that’s left of fall--
the damaged stone,  the austere moons of their nails.