edges of the foothills building against the wind
in a wall up from the river-is the dark
and how it came into the car at a speed we understood,
how it ftlled in the small lights going out
everywhere behind us, how it moved on our faces;
how later, after dinner, all of us tiring, it touched
all our faces. What I remember that night from Galway's face,
larger, darker than the failing light could hold,
is how the next day he talked about the work,
up until the end, on the last book,
or didn't talk but wandered lost in a moment
out of memory of the last poem of
that Vence morning
marry times since,
and how he waited there,
in thought, with the many sources.
On the Sunday I spent the empty early morning
wandering too, lost in Martins Ferry,
where down the street from the library the Heslop Brothers
Undertakers were still in business and farther still
the WPA Swimming Pool Project Plaque
shone like a war memorial object.
And I walked down to the water, the beautiful
Ohio, Depression-wide all the way to Wheeling,
and saw that whatever the working terrors are
they are worse over there, on the other side,
where West Virginia-laid-off, sabbath, or dead-time
on the line - is still a foundry and a glassworks
and an icehouse filled with coal,
where they take you, out of pity, in the morning
before daylight and bring you back in the evening,
fire in the sun, white-of-the-eye-of-the-moon;
and that even the petty farmers, our fathers,
had come down from the farms to cross.
James Wright, Galway would finally say,
had gone to the end of the table, which we will earn,
as we earn the daily bread set before us,
and in Galway's face, in the room of the gathered that day,
you could see the winter daybreak poem take form,
in a whole other country, in memory,
in high gold Mediterranean air but lifted here
like stone or lumber flat above the river.
