Keith Wilson died the other day. He was a friend I've known since the
mid-60s,
when I spent some years living in El Paso while he was living in southern
New
Mexico: Anthony, right on the Texas-New Mexico border; then San Miguel,
farther
north, up the Mesilla Valley of the Rio Grande; and then Las Cruces. Any
house
of Keith and Heloise Wilson was full of music and wine and poetry, a
caravanserai
for poets traveling north or south, east or west.
Keith, at one stage of his life, often wrote of the sea, and his sea poems
were
among the best poems to come out of the Korean War. Here's one that's not
overtly war related:
The Sea
"On the beach
the ocean ends in water.
--George Oppen
*The Materials*
The crisp line, taut, in all
intimations, thrown out, cork circling
the water, spash, my hand
reaching out
--the call, rightly named, these
*Materials*, the call is there
simple, demanding
response and a certain
attention to pulse, the
movement of whatever the work
asks of man--is that what
I'm trying to say, a man,
and how, sometimes, he doesn't
drown. Coming up spitting
salt water, safely past the
screws, it *is* a man
intact who waves
from the calm wake; behind
him the sea clear, oceans
held in place by a line.
And he wrote of dusty New Mexico
towns:
The Politicians
come
come here with full bellies
& shined shoes to the one street
of San Miguel, talking, waving
hands, their harsh gringo Spanish
shouted in the hanging dust
of the square
the men of the town
stand uneasy, aware of their hard
hands, the blue of the stranger's
eyes, their own mudcrusted boots
stiff with clay
they are ashamed these men
whose hands are strong with work & loving.
they listen. then go to the bar,
beer & red wine, juke box Infante songs,
his dead voice singing of a Mexico
which was sad, beautiful, but theirs
--riding free across a green land,
*gritos* on their lips & dead politicians
fall, one-by-one before their dreaming guns.
--both from *Graves Registry and Other Poems*
[New York: Grove Press, 1969]
Coincidentally, while 1969 did not mark the first publication of a
collection of
poems by Keith Wilson, it did mark the first publication of a collection of
poems
by me. And it was Keith Wilson who sat me down on his living room floor and
showed me how to put a collection of poems together. That first book that
bore
a epigraph by Keith Wilson: "a sunlit unity / desperately sought" and
contained
this poem written on the occasion of Keith's and Heloise's moving from
Anthony,
New Mexico, to a big new (well, not new new) house in San Miguel:
Moving Out
for Keith & Heloise Wilson
saying goodbye
is no trouble:
a house is a skin
to be shucked
wriggled out of
room by room
closet by closet
until what remains
is piles of boxes,
a few empty hangers,
a heap of debris
on the kitchen floor
which never seemed so wide,
a neighbor's dog
who come to say goodbye
from a respectable distance.
fr. *Transparencies and Projections*
[New York: New Rivers Press, 1969]
--HJ
--
Halvard Johnson
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