Afterthought: a poem

Afterthought

A whole half-life has happened since you went.

Thirty-five years. Whose life was that? Mozart

had so much – it was more time than you got.

You stayed just long enough to reach “grown-up”

and that was it. It’s not about talent

wasted, or what you might have been: who gives

a shit about accomplishments? Not us,

not now. On the far side of the planet

from anything you saw or could have guessed,

looking up weather, I noticed the date

and thought of you. This is the way you ghost,

through numbers, intimations, other lives.

No Google search will ever turn you up

your relics are in hard copy, or lost.

Or in my poem. Thirty-five times round,

and I am sure I’m not alone to note

this, where you rise for an instant to cross

a scattered consciousness, then fall to rest.

Tracy Ryan 

Anniversaries

By Tracy

I'm one of those people in whose minds particular dates seem to brand themselves, so that I can't help but note them passing each year -- yesterday ten years since the death of John Forbes, today two years since that of someone else I once knew, a strange pairing of two anniversaries that is peculiar to me, since the two people were unconnected in life. It sounds morbid, but it's not entirely -- birthdays and other dates engrave themselves into my psyche in a similar fashion. I cannot-not-notice them.

So today I am thinking of W. S. Merwin's poem "For the anniversary of my death" ("Every year without knowing it I have passed the day...") which is from The Second Four Books of Poems (Copper Canyon, 1993), and can also be read at

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171868

and just in general of the strangely private nature of calendars, that exists alongside their public function...