Wednesday, September 10, 2008

I NEVER MET HIM


An erudite, opinionated, extremely intelligent, and sublimely talented (the best kind of) poet died tonight. His name was Reginald Shepherd, and although I never met him in person, I had often turned to his blog when I needed a boost of humanism and intellectualism to fill that which seemed missing from my otherwise full, busy life. I remember when he got colon cancer, and following his continued attempts to write and write and write, even when he wasn't feeling so great. The last few months he had been so sick, with a horrifying spread of the cancer to his liver. The most recent entry in his blog had been composed from his hospital bed, and transcribed by his partner, Robert. In it, he memorializes a mentor of his, Alvin Feinman by applying all the critical skill he could muster to a luscious, piece of heartbreak, "True Night." I'll link to his posting here, and on Reginald's true night and the eve of our truly darkest day, post an exerpt from this poem:


True Night



So it is midnight, and all

The angels of ordinary day gone,

The abiding absence between day and day

Come like true and only rain

Comes instant, eternal, again:



As though an air had opened without sound

In which all things are sanctified,

In which they are at prayer—

The drunken man in his stupor,

The madman’s lucid shrinking circle;



As though all things shone perfectly,

Perfected in self-discrepancy:

The widow wedded to her grief,

The hangman haloed in remorse—

I should not rearrange a leaf,



No more than wish to lighten stones

Or still the sea where it still roars—

Here every grief requires its grief,

Here every longing thing is lit

Like darkness at an altar.



As long as truest night is long,

Let no discordant wing

Corrupt these sorrows into song.

from, "True Night," by Alvin Feinman, discussed on Reginald Shepherd's Blog and in his book, Orpheus in the Bronx.