A poem for a Poet

I think of a coffin’s quiet
when I sit in the world of my car
separate and observing
with the windows closed and washed clean
by the rain. I like to sit there
watching other worlds pass. Yesterday evening
I sat in my car on Sheridan Square
flat and broke and a little bit damp
thinking about money and rain and how
the Village broads with their narrow hips
rolled like drunken shovels down Christopher Street.

Then I saw you unmistakeably
darting out between a police car
and what used to be Jim Atkin’s the all-night diner—
on the corner of Fourth Street
where we sat making bets the last time I saw you
on how many busts we could count through the plateglass windows
in those last skinny hours before dawn
with our light worded-out but still burning
the earlier evening’s promise now dregs in a coffee cup—
and I saw you dash out and turn left at the corner
your beard spiky with rain and refusing
shelter under your chin.

I had thought you were dead Jarrell
struck down by a car at sunset on a North Carolina road
or were you the driver
tricked into a fatal swerve by some twilit shadow
or was that Frank O’hara
or Conrad Kent Rivers
and you the lonesome spook in a Windy City motel
draped in the secrets of your convulsive death
all alone
all poets all loved and dying alone
that final death
less real than those deaths you lived
and for which I forgave you.

I watched you hurry down Fourth Street Jarrell
from the world of my car in the rain
remembering our Spring Festival night
at Women’s College in North Carolina
and wasn’t that world a coffin retreat
of spring whispers romance and rhetoric
Untouched
by the winds buffeting up from Greensboro
and nobody mentioned the Black Revolution
or Sit-Ins or Freedom Rides or SNCC
or cattle-prods in Jackson, Mississippi—
where I was to find myself how many years later;

You were mistaken that night and I told you
in a letter beginning—Dear Jarrell
if you sit in one place long enough
the whole world can pass you by…
you were wrong when you said
I took my living too seriously
meaning you were afraid I might take you too seriously
you shouldn’t have worried, because
although I always dug you
too much to put you down
I never took you at all
except as a good piece of my first journey South
except as I take you now
gladly and separate
at a distance and wondering as I have so often
how come
being so cool, you weren’t also a little bit
black.

And also why have you returned
to this dying city
and what piece of me is it then
buried down there in North Carolina.