commemorative poem

Convalescing

I spend the days deciding
on a commemorative poem.
Not, luckily, an epitaph.
A quiet poem
to establish the fact of me.
As one of the incidental faces
in those stone processions.
Carefully done.
Not claiming that I was
at any of the great victories.
But that I volunteered.

—Jack Gilbert, the last poem in the "Uncollected Poems" section of Jack Gilbert's Collected Poems (Knopf, 2012)

[n.b.: Yesterday I had the pleasure of joining Henry Lyman, Larry Felson, Tina Chang, Linda Gregg, Gerd Stern, and Susan Bogle Finnegan in a celebration of Jack's poetry at the Medicine Show theatre in New York City. Jack's Collected Poems, only published in March of 2012, is now in its second printing.]