“When, my dears, is the right age to die?”
Our hostess, the centenarian
Dorothea Tanning, saw herself
out of the running, but enjoyed
hounding her guests (and herself)
with this mean stickler—it was as if
one of the Fates was questioning us:
“David Alexander, I think you’re
the youngest artist at this table:
how old would you decide one must be
to claim a Deathbed of Distinction?”
“Ninety?” David’s scared digits seemed to
please Dorothea and the others . . .
Everyone but me. Count up the facts:
for the last sixty years of my life
I’ve attempted to do what I could
by way of poems, but it appears
that an alarming proportion of
Contemporary American Poets,
whose lives and works I believe I shared
in poetic and in social terms,
were having none of it: their lives ended!
Ammons Wright Plath Warren Bishop Rich
Roethke Clampitt Van Doren Van Duyn
Ginsberg Rukeyser Dugan Lowell
Finkel Simpson Hollander Merrill
Hecht O’Hara Kizer Kunitz Koch
Ransom Moss Kinnell (and this week!) Strand.
It would be all too easy to fill
more of my stanzas with more of such
mortalities . . . Count them for yourself:
every one is dead. And I’m alive!
I know, I know: I can always read
them, but they can’t read themselves (or me).
You see? Doing anything, even
writing poems, is something
we all must be alive for—only
we’re not all alive. Not all alive . . .
Which is why we write, why I must write
this poem right now, this time around
at a mere eighty-five. Certainly
I didn’t know them all—the dead ones—
intimately. Some of those I loved
most (read most often) I never knew
really well. But once he or she died
I discovered that, as Tolstoy says,
they’d been the most precious, the dearest,
and most necessary of beings.
It’s unlikely I (or anyone)
will be celebrating his or her
ninety-fifth birthday. Or would even
want to. That’s why it occurred to me
—for reasons designated above—
this is the proper occasion to write
my eighty-fifth birthday poem now.
from The Yale Review