Lex Runciman: Two Poems for Two Poets

“Just how aggressively did the artist booze?”
— Andrew Russeth, Artnet, April 1, 2024


One apt question, multiple answers.
Not very, I’d say, for he’d vowed to stop
And vowed to marry, which he did,
Happily – openly astonished at his luck.

The imagination is smarter than you are,
He’d say, the next thing always belongs.
If you like the sound of something
Listen for it again: repeat it later.

And once when we knew the novel
In progress stymied him, turned him
Not pontifical, but ungenerous, cagey
And angry, we leaned on him hard enough

He confessed: there’s been another murder
And I don’t know who did it.
Years later, we met at an airport,
His layover between flights. A hard time,

He said, and for an hour and a half he boozed
Aggressively, and bought us dinner.
At his last reading, a one-lung affair,
His poems in his voice brought us tears.


–– for Richard Hugo (1923-1982)

~~

May Day, Sister Mary


Madeline, mother of poems, bright flowers
This day wild on your desk, bless you your sky
That does not let go. Your St. Ursula of bilocation

And irony, bless us here and bless us again there.
Bless two and to and too, consonants, vowels,
And plain and plane, adjective, verb, and noun.

Bless the assonance and obedience of the eyes,
And your first house under Montana sun, under the M,
Yours, yours, and that bottle of Blue Nun.

Poems sure, your listening generosity taught us –
Imaginary Ancestors, Spectral Waves, Magpie
On the Gallows, Blue Dusk, and from an upper window,

The Light Station On Tillamook Rock,
Always order in its place, your Oregon to mine.


— for Madeline DeFrees (1919-2015)

Copyright 2024 Lex Runciman

Lex Runciman’s many books include Unlooked For (Salmon Poetry, 2023). Madeline DeFrees and Richard Hugo were his first poetry teachers at the University of Montana in the 1970s. Madeline was known for many years as Sister Mary Gilbert.