for Alfred Kern,1924-2009
Search Amazon for his novel,
The Width of Waters, and you get
No Image Available
and No Customer Reviews.
Instead, you see suggestions
for dry texts
on hydro resource management.
Yet, as if the red ink is still wet
between the lines
of my fictions typewritered onto
now yellowing pages,
his words manifest in my mind’s margins.
I wonder if the story
isn’t or can’t be deeper.
Press harder.
Once, as a curious student,
I visited his classic Victorian
facing Diamond Park,
watched as he released,
with sympathetic maneuvers,
an alarmed sparrow
who’d managed
to land in his kitchen.
It probably was a good idea
for you to learn
how to go back and forth
between past and present.
“Let me speak it to you,” he says.
With cigarette wedged
between two middle-
aged middle fingers,
he squints, takes a drag,
smokily quotes Roethke:
“I knew a woman, lovely in her bones…”
But I’m a bit dubious
about the technique—
more efficient to use
introspection or dialogue
—usually indirect.
Years later—graying, older
than he was back then—I learned
from his obituary: he had moved
to the state I lived in. Had lived
next town over. But it was over.
He was gone.
I missed his denouement, his finis.
I hope some savvy literary agent
served as his Charon.
Such wide waters.
For gruff careful reproofs,
for rare praise,
for questions, questions,
for naming the ones whose passages
speak unfading to the fading spirit—
my gratitude
is too late, and too sappy.
But let me, anyway,
speak it to you.
“This ending
is better—more realistic.”
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