Giving Notice as Postscript in a Past-Due Obit

Phyllis Janowitz, Phyllis Janowitz,

Did you you ever get it? Did you really

Know what to do with it, then, when you did?

Sweet satin, how I would like

to lie in all that money.

I’d know what to do with it.

Born in New York to a cop and a clerk,

In the middle of the Great Depression,

Anointed by Elizabeth Bishop

Herself, then again by Maxine Kumin,

A lifetime teaching poetry students,

Running the creative writing program

Of an Ivy League university—

Somewhere in there, in fact in your forties,

You had a luncheon with the rich Marshalls,

Or shall we say, the first-person speaker

Of your 1978 poem did.

The Marshalls, so called, did not come off well.

Your words were vivid, images intense

Enough to want to nip a bit to quote

In this later, blander, post-hoc obit.

We’ll just say, concerning one verse, we know

The feeling, the envy, the conviction.

But we won’t lie. In all that rich, we’d quit.