Sunday, January 1, 2017

JEAN GARRIGUE'S MEMORY
(1929-2005)

A punctuation mark
of tribute to Jean Garrigue's
memory still intrigues me,
in a clearly articulated
and matriculated originality
opening a dramatic invitation
in its literary high bar
by a poet's by-laws
of cultural high gravity
cannot darken any natural spark
as a free agent for poetry
in her revolutionary shadows
going beyond all boundaries
attendant to auditory miracles
we cannot ignore
her beautiful an a-historical
less mechanical way
of performance
from an ethical resonance
in an upheaval of renewal
no one was better than Jean
in our age of
"Partisan Review"
with a mature dramatic ability
from her mirrors of elegance
at her out of doors
natural mind
in mid century span,
I'm also another poet boasting
of her almost Elizabethan elan
depositing grammar
in verbal language
onto the dictionary scales
from fictional forms
like an emerging Persephone
of a mature language
into a mosiac of musicality
to sing and storm in a chorus
for us backed
by a contrary
human power and elegance
in memoirs of observation
from the flowering essence
of Jean's Garrigue's
gorgeous lyrical echo
not any other twentieth
century celebrity quite lik
her  song and solo,
as I'm opening
her arbitrary nature poetry
from a liberality
conceding her long suffering
from a domestic policy
reaching out in my library
of arts and letters
that I read her annually
every first day of January
each year opening up
her poetry iconoclastic way
to mirror her better sensibilities
who, like me
adored Chopin, Proust
and Keats
in a mature way favoring
the far country
over the tops on mountains,
and the city stops of Boston
and going out on the sea
until she ultimately
finds and fulfills
her own unlikely identity
and timely legacy.

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