I think often now of our short time together

on this sad gray earth.  From October 9, 1953

until November 9 same year and then you

left on whiskey angel wings to another place

nobody knows about except other angels.

One short symmetrical month sharing the air

of this place and the pain we all feel on this earth.  I often think maybe it would have been better for you to have met me and stared into my blue unfocussed baby eyes, that beautiful slatey blue colour of babies' eyes and I'd

a puked on your tweeds and made you feel better and not want to drink so much

whiskey.  My dad would have taken you

around the house newly built and my mother would make hamburgers for everyone and

politely not care if you were a famous poet

but only that you were a visitor in her house

and the kids would peep shyly from the other room.  I'm telling you it would have been

better than New York groupies hanging on to

you and making you crazy because they can't know anything about a poet's lonely pain and

all the years spent in solitude not preparing

for public things all hurtful.  You could have

stayed in the little room at the top of the stairs

and listened to me cry in the dark and maybe

got another poem.  It's always sad when

someone dies and my voice cracked when I read Do Not Go Gentle at my father's

funeral but I made it to the end of the poem,

and then I sat down crying, thinking about

you and my father and our short time

together on this sad, gray, earth.