LETTERS TO THE DEAD: TWENTY – EIGHT  

6/28/2018
Dear Mark Morgan (1950 – 2017)           

         I began thinking about this project called
“Letters to the Dead” at your memorial service
which you and Irene planned during the Fall
as you discontinued treatment and that terrible
form of lymphoma (Sezary) enveloped your body.
You wanted a Spring-Time gathering of friends  
to celebrate your life with art, music, and poetry.
When that day arrived your friend (& poet), James
Pope, spoke of a lifelong correspondence between
the two of you and what it meant to him to have
your letters to reflect upon. I considered the idea of
writing these letters every day for a month and posting
them on the Lexpomo blog, using the classical form
of Apostrophe: an addressing of a dead friend as if he
were alive, present, and capable of understanding.
As my 1965 edition of “Poetry And Poetics” points out,
“Apostrophe gives life and immediacy to language,
but is also subject to abuse and open to parody. (Yikes!)         
         Mark, I approach an end of this self- imposed
exile from the living. (Everyone on the farm wonders
when I’m going to get back to work.) Not since high
school, when I had to translate Book 6 of Virgil’s
Aeneid, have I spent so much time in the Underworld.
I’ve begun to feel the presence of all those I’ve addressed
in these letters but my desire to keep these accounts brief
have left them as flat as pancakes. I’m afraid the task was
too steep for one as out of shape as myself. Perhaps they’re
merely a start, but more than likely an end.           
         Mark, you were born mid-century on New Year’s Eve.
To me you always seemed to hold to the center line until,
at the last minute, you would make a wild veer into the  
joyous fear of uncertainty. This dichotomy appears
everywhere in your art and life…In closing, here’s a poem
I found this morning stuck between pages 166 & 167
of Hart Crane’s “Complete Poems.”
 
I wrote it on your birthday, Jim  

Echo Above Cuzick Ridge
(For Mark Morgan)
 
Unseen rustlings drift coolly
amid the moonlight’s rejected
appetites…my heart off-beat
in this inkling of fog lift

Fluted sound over the veiled ridge
ceases
like hot love blown with the breath
to put out sixty-seven candles.
Now some voice rekindles the echo