Minor Poet

His last composed poem, "Over My Head,"

closes with the evening tide

coming in as the light fails over Brighton Beach.

In the years of The Great Plague,

he lived with his mother and brother

and wrote the Elegies that remain unpublished,

under the eaves in an unfinished room above

his mother's late-night television vigil.

He wrote to a ghostly laugh-track

in the night. Though he cut out and saved

lurid, five-color magazine pictures

of The South Pacific, The Aegean; though

he hoped for a winter crossing by steamer

until his final weakness set in,

underneath he was a city boy

whose poems drifted like a dinghy

in small inlets—Gravesend, Rockaway—

out too far for safety, in sight of land.