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Mary Oppen, George Oppen, Swathmore, 1979. Photo Robert S. DuPlessis

Geoffrey O’Brien

In Memory of Oppen

                                          “The solitary are obsessed”

      1

a plain kitchen
table, his face
tilted downward

with eyes closed
as if to listen in
on what he would say next —

“insufficient care
for the meaning of words” —
painful to think so —

or, of prepositions
“they’re hell on wheels” —
waterfront apartments

emptied of everything
but what they did not
in the first place contain —

to inhabit
a continual erosion
of what is there


      2

not that he did
not want to speak
the words aloud

but it made him
uneasy — to mistake
accident for the actual,

if the heart startled
at a tone of voice —
special pleading —

preferred
to remove himself
from the utterance,

a weathered
free-standing hulk
taking its own place


      3

to wake up
in the middle
of a chilly afternoon

to the presence
of words — hull,
pavements, gull —

a gray world
saved
in time for autumn,

the stairwell
winding down
toward late light —

empty, flat,
alien — a generation
fills the air

with their living absence
in each worn handle,
each cracked brick —

ghost words —
more solid
than anything —

come carrying
fifty years
into the stone yard


      4

all that time
they had been in apartments
and cars,

the sun had moved
across the room,
night dropped down,

a foot touched
the bare floor —
key grinding in lock —

under a spell
until it said so:
wake —

when you get back
to where you were
before you were going there —

to find a postcard
undelivered — “man,
read this book”