in memory of Thom Gunn
You made it look too easy in the doing,
tempting the amateur and acolyte
to think that one could vie with style, pursuing
the oracle’s job, a rake’s calling, or might
step in tradition as lightly as you’d tread
in motorcycle boots the classroom boards,
infusing your blood into the sleeping dead
Makers exhumed from the sonorous hoards
of word-things, to read a grateful shade
back into life resounding on the tongue.
Our tongue—we barely spoke it, but got from you
the sense, the leather necromancer who made
his living casting spells: we were too young
to know that’s not a thing one hopes to do.
—Peter Spagnuolo
Peter Spagnuolo is a criminal sentencing specialist working in New York City on behalf of federal defendants; he also moonlights as an electrician. A new chapbook of his poems, Lark-Mirrors and Murder-Hogs, appears this winter as a letterpress edition artist’s book.
