By the Window onto You

Last words, Waldman’s big elegy

For Berrigan, almost forty

Years ago. At fifty or so,

Young for most, not for most poets

Of mid-twentieth century

American vintage (think Plath,

O’Hara, Sexton, Berryman),

Berrigan became Berrigan,

All name, no flesh. And now the name

Shows up as a dedication

In morning’s redistribution

Of Waldman’s Canzone as the poem

Of the day, digital, although

You can bet it was scrawled or typed,

And you know it was set in print,

Inked on copies of a journal

Now raiding its archives of poems

To distribute to people’s phones.

This is a window onto you,

Whoever sits by a window,

Reading poems that will do no good,

Unless by good you mean exist.

And we do. Our window is on

To you, aficionado.

The good is what has stopped living

Or never lived, but which exists.