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For Ethan Grumbach,
“In Memory of Sigmund Freud,” by W.H. Auden

“…he would have us remember most of all
to be enthusiastic over the night,
not only for the sense of wonder
it alone has to offer, but also
because it needs our love. With large sad eyes
its delectable creatures look up and beg
us dumbly to ask them to follow:
they are exiles who long for the future
that lives in our power.”

For Martha Slagerman,
From Amy Clampitt, “Dancers Exercising”

“Frame within frame, the evolving conversation   
is dancelike, as though two could play   
at improvising snowflakes’
six-feather-vaned evanescence,
no two ever alike. All process
and no arrival . . .
the perfection
of memory consisting, it would seem,   
in the never-to-be-completed.”

For Richard Weiss,
“The Knight’s portrait,” by Geoffrey Chaucer

“A knight there was, and that a worthy man,
Who from the time that he first began
To ride about, he loved chivalry,
Truth, and honor, freedom and courtesy.”

For Linda Goodman,
“A Thought,” by Philip Lawrence

“so exciting, so fascinating, so
wholly fulfilling, so viscerally
gratifying to
think, to think deeply, to ponder
. . . our reality
and its infinite possibilities.”

For Doryann Lebe,
“On World-Making,” by Nomi Stone

“To love is to tell the story of the world. There was
An ocean with a boat mountains a meadow too painful to stare
At directly. Haven’t I been here before? Yes. No: not quite.”

For Bart Blinder,
“The School Where I Studied,” by Yehuda Amicai, trans. Chana Bloch

“I passed by the school where I studied as a boy
And said in my heart: here I learned certain things
And didn’t learn others. All my life I have loved . . .
The things I didn’t learn.”

For Tom Brod,
“Daydreams for Ginsburg,” by Jack Kerouac

“I will write
It, all the talk of the world
Everywhere in this morning, leav-
ing open parenthesis sections
For my own accompanying inner
Thoughts – with roars of me
All brain-all world
Roaring-vibrating.”

For Mike Gales
“The Crowd at the Ball Game,” by William Carlos Williams

“The crowd at the ball game
Is moved uniformly
By a spirit of uselessness
Which delights them—
All the exciting detail
Of the chase
And the escape, the error
The flash of genius…
All to no end
Save beauty.”

For Janet Smith
“A Gift,” by Denise Levertov

“Just when you seem to yourself
Nothing but a flimsy web
Of questions, you are given
The questions of others to hold
In the emptiness of your hands,
Songbird eggs that can still hatch
If you keep them warm,
Butterflies opening and closing themselves
In your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
Their scintillant fur, their dust.”

For Myra Pomerantz
“This Flight,” by Pat Schneider

“This feathering is not down
Bedding of ducks
Wintering
On the pond, wings folded,
This feathering is for flight…
I am still a long way from home
But turning now,
Banking on air,
Coming in.”