Requiescet in pace Richard Alan Macksey
Last night one candle illuminated
One thousand young Poets, but still there's one
Of the thousands you have reached who wonders,
Still scorched with light from such vast distances
If I, in the end, disappointed you,
Great reader of texts, that included each
One of us, because I could only learn
A little of what you knew, a thought I
Could not bear, as your praise still rustles my
Ears across the years, as if there still is time.
How could I be worthy, at 18 and
Impossible to teach, of even the
Hallowed hall where your pipe smoke and laughter
Sang rosaries to the explanations
Humanity thought to offer, that were
Not quite true, not near answers, not even
Proper apologia, but preserved
Somehow, by someone, who I believed to
Be you. For you had read all of the books
And could talk as if you had written them,
Yet pulled away as they were discovered
By others, in all the absurdity
The minds of children can confer, enough
To bend, for more important than meaning
Is the one who doesn't understand,
Not that understanding is what one needs,
It's sufficient to be inside the room
Of paneling and ghosts, with the window
On the jungle that once had filled the earth.
It had to be that light and elusive,
For it was, your brow proclaimed, that serious.
Ideas are the only thing that's real,
After all, not these tables and these chairs,
They should not be left to the philistines
Of literature, the game-theory doctors
With their agendas of foreign cars
And champagne gardens. In the chaos of
The mess that man had made out of his mind
Was this beautiful truth that lived beyond
This place and even this time, that somehow
Stayed behind all those years you were not there,
And now, when you can exist no longer,
Seem something rare that's lost, even as new
Daffodils arise as if they will stay,
And the departing leave no memory,
For that is how it has to be. But this
Commencement is different, for the professors
Leave their marks in so many echoing rooms
Mere death can never take dominion.
The institution lives on, if only
To give the students something to live up
To, a dream of learning, if not the thing
Itself, the august promises of knowledge,
Even if, in the end, it's only of
People, how beautiful they are, as they
Step over others up the ladder to
The highest book. A desk under a bunk.
"The velocities of change." Not some penance
To earn the robes of illumined rooms.
Just more notebook pages to be filled.
