for Alan Ansen
“most delicate hippopotamus of poets”
—Allen Ginsberg
In the yerokomeio in Athens (Yannis e-mails me),
“Alan reads Agatha Christie and the Trib
but can barely hold a pencil, far less write.”
Far less write. “He says he wants to die
but insists on his flu shot, his glass of red
wine, and ice cream!! When I found him
napping at 10.00 a.m. yesterday, he
told me that he was ‘just practicing.’”
Jack Kerouac dubbed you “Rollo Greb,”
“Austin Bromberg,” “Irwin Swenson.”
--dumb names in books. All that’s over now.
Over too the island lecture courses
on “The Poetry of Pound, Eliot, Yeats,
Auden and Ansen” that you once gave.
Over our dispute over diffidence,
I pro, of course, you contra.
I had an old house there once, not far away,
with a view of the Acropolis from my front window
and a pomegranate tree in the courtyard from among
whose roots I dug up a brass pestle
long separated from its mortar,
buried perhaps by some forgotten kid.
They tore it down long ago, my old house.
An upscale polykatoikeia stands there now.
Note: yerokomeio = old age home; polykatoikeia = apartment building. Alan Ansen died on November 12, 2006, at 530 a.m. He is buried in the Jewish Cemetery in Athens.
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