If Jean Garrigue and Larry Rivers had not aborted their baby,
I would celebrate wassailing nights and days.
Jean's poetry lived every minute passionately, yes, I include sleep.
Jean "was our one lyric poet who made ecstasy her home."
When she walked it was on solid earth and clouds.
When she shopped, ordered potatoes, there was something
uplifting she gave the vendor. She wrote sacred history.
She introduced me to Marianne Moore
almost singing "the noblest Roman of them all."
Larry’s paintings were stuck with beauty, ideas,
humankind more than most when he was clean.
He played jazz, slept with his son, spoke Yiddish.
The newborn, 70 now, would be my friend.
In Washington Square we might speak about
following the heart, the disappearing Village—
Eleanor Roosevelt and Auden were good neighbors.
Where are the used bookstores of yesteryear,
the Chelsea, Newtown, Gramercy phone numbers
without cellphones or eBooks
Now making it new is often just new,
not what we can’t live without. Their child’s face
some Jean, some Larry, the rest left to God,
part Quaker, part wrong angel, part Jew.
I bet the aging man or woman can sing.
If in a plastic bag the fetus was thrown in the trash,
it’s still around because in the old days we said
"matter can neither be created nor destroyed."
I will not name the doctor who performed the abortion,
it was a crime before Roe v. Wade, but he was a great poet—
years afterward Larry told me the truth.