HOWARD NEMEROV


At forty-five, Nemerov,
you were teaching me, though
you won't remember that,
or my name, or that we sat
on a wall at a school
in a western state where
I tried to listen hard.

You have won the prize now
and were pleased, or so your
son said as he spoke on
educational TV,
a show about you as poet
where you walked a lot
and other people talked.

What I want to say (I
feel like a fool calling
you Sir), Nemerov, is
I am glad for you, though
you were never kind to
me, or unkind, as I
am glad for anyone

who is rewarded when
he is worthy, the mower
whose scythe hugs the ground, the
engineer whose bridge does
not, after twenty years,
collapse with a hundred
cars into the river.

Now I am forty-five.
Perhaps I didn't listen
hard enough, your advice
about reading long, then
deep, maybe; perhaps no
one can be taught much by
another, but I wish you

to know your sure step there
drew me into the drama:
I like an Elizabethan
player watching that other
actor as he paused, then
turned and disappeared down
some lost street in Stratford.

—originally published in The Southern Review