by Charles Olson
(a funeral poem for Rainer M. Gerhardt)
Rainer,
the man who was about to celebrate his 52nd birthday
the day I learned of your death at 28, said:
“I lie out on Dionysius’ tongue”!
the sort of language you talked, and I did,
correctingly —
as I heard this other German wrongly,
from his accent, and because I was thinking of you,
talking of how much you gave us all hearing
in Germany ( as I watch a salamander on the end of a dead pine branch
snagging flies ), what I heard this man almost twice your age say was,
“I lie out on a dinosaur’s tongue”!
for my sense, still, is that,
despite your sophistication
and your immense labors ...
It will take some telling. It has to do with what WCW
( of all that you published in fragmente, to see Bill’s
R R BUMS in futura!
it has to do with how far back are
Americans,
as well as,
Germans
“walk on spongey feet
if you would cross
carry purslane
if you get into her bed
guard the changes
when you scratch your ear
I
It is this business
that you should die!
Who shot up,
out of the ruins,
and hung there,
in the sky,
the first of Europe
I could have words with:
as Holderlin on Patmos you
trying to hold bay leaves
on a cinder block!
Now I can only console you,
sing of willows,
and dead branches,
worry the meanness
that you do not live,
wear the ashes
of loss
Neither of us
carrying a stick
any more
Greeley told me
how you lived
II
I have urged anyone
back ( as Williams asked
that Sam Houston
be recognized
as 1 said,
Rainer, plant
your ash
“I drive a stake into the ground, isn’t it silly,”
I said out loud in the night, “to drive a stake into the ground?”
How primitive
does one have to get? Or,
as you and I were both open
to the charge: how large
can a quote
get, he
said, eyeing me
with a blue
eye
Were your eyes
brown, Rainer?
Rainer,
who is in the ground,
what did you look like?
Did you die of your head bursting
like a land-mine?
Did you walk
on your own unplanted self?
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