(Poet, biographer, critic and emeritus professor)

On the night when I heard you had died,

I read one of your books in my bed.

It created, for me, a bridge to you

A poetic soul much needed by me,

As I came to terms with the loss of my friend,

My American ‘brother’ for twenty-three years.

You were the friend I had always hoped for,

To discuss the careful craft of freshly made poems,

To know the bond between us could never be broken,

That the long letters we wrote were pages of trust

Between two poets who were doing their best

To capture and voice the duende of their worlds.

Vince, you reminded me to speak in the sweetness

Of truths and not to just voice the bitterness of a grief,

To praise the blessings of our flesh and bone being

And the love we garner in family and friends,

As the blood in us aged in our chosen vocations,

As our hearts pulsed with the ‘song-weary universe’.

You are gone, my dearest ‘brother’, yet you remain

In all those American students you taught as a professor

Of English and all those poets whom you helped 

To master Frost’s ‘serious game’. The time you gave 

Over to others is seeded in those of us forever blessed 

With your knowledge: the dedicated years 

You spent in your writer’s room, your ‘monk’s cell’, 

In your home with Annie and your two precious daughters.

Friend of John Ciardi, poet and translator

Of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and John Hall Wheelock,

Poet and Senior Editor at Scribner’s, New York,

It was you who lead the movement to erect a statue

To John Steinbeck in Sag Harbor, Long Island.

You sent me so many books over the decades

And introduced me to writers who you knew confirmed

Our solitary trade, our silent ritual at our desks.

The gifts you sent, an old stopwatch, a sailor’s whistle.

A model ship bearing the name Sag Harbor,

Long Island calendars and framed lighthouse photos,

Are here in this room where I sit each day,

To search and to find the undersong of language,

While ‘the eternal note of sadness’ is never far 

From my mind. Vince, son of a fisherman,

Italian-American, your rod was a pen,

Your imagination the sea where you cast your thoughts

For the rhythms and the music of deep-down emotions,

The moving shadows of truths so ancient yet new.

I celebrate you, my dear ‘brother’, ‘child’ of Walt Whitman,

And the tender light that came from your written words

To me, a correspondence that bridged our separation

During most of our friendship. You in your America 
And me in my Wales - and the eternal Atlantic between us.

Peter Thabit Jones © 2022

 

Published in REMEMBERING VINCE CLEMENTE (Edited by Peter Thabit Jones), 2021