to Thom Gunn
Like the small cat’s outsize shadow
on the white apartment wall
my iPhone camera couldn’t catch,
you will not be caught
in lines other than your own.
But you have been in the room with me—
the way, as you wrote
in one of your many warm and nimble letters,
the poets you liked best (most of them dead, like Herbert)
were in the room with you.
And pretty boys in the room, also,
their photos plastered on your study wall.
“Hey Keanu, I’m here! Here!”
Once, in your claustrophobic Berkeley office
(both of us earnest, blushing)
you penciled question marks and tiny checks
in the margins of my short, sad poems.
Once, I made you laugh—an anagram
on our lionized friend’s name:
tRy Pink robes!
You had a full-on laugh and loved the sun,
and loved sex so inordinately
I suddenly wanted to rhyme
squander with pleasure.
But that’s not right: you’d never think pleasure a waste,
although you may have been, as we used to say, “wasted.”
Like the lovers you kept as friends and their new lovers,
cats were welcome in your Cole Street home.
Fierce defenders of individual freedom,
most secure within structures of repetition,
don’t you suppose that all housecats would vote
(however bohemian the home)
old-fashioned Republican like Marianne Moore?
You changed your mind about Moore, but now
you cannot change, or answer.
Mind averts its eyes at Death,
Heart stops its ears.
But you believed in looking squarely at
and staying open (as in that Caravaggio
of Paul you wrote about to Tony White,
as in the aching couplets of your “Lament”)
—and were a paradox, as suited one
who wanted to be a twentieth-century Donne:
resolutely faithful and unfaithful,
unassuming yet theatrical,
in conduct as in verse both formal and free,
on the move, and still.
—Jeredith Merrin
Jeredith Merrin has authored four books of poetry: Shift, Bat Ode, Cup, and Owling. Her new collection, A P A R T, is nearing completion.
