Good Riddance To Those Years
by Mary Jane White




For James Wright

Eighty, eighty-two, when you and Hugo died,
And Kinnell leaned in and read
From each of you—
And then from Patrick Kavenagh—
Two poems, I remember, and
Can—give me a moment—find:

One, In Memory of My Mother, so I
Do not think of you lying in the wet clay;
And, O, commemorate me where there is water
Which also recalls you in so stilly
Greeny at the heart of summer, and even faintly
In the form of address: Brother,

And in the description that follows
As a brief disparagement of prose:
A swan goes by head low with many apologies.





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