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Here's a long post, so long---I promise, I won't impose this way again. My apologies, and my thanks for this forum, in advance. .
No longer to see that ruined face, as I have seen it, off and on through a loop that has now stopped: At the back of "the house" at a professor's play done at wooster st.; at an early desk reading--I remember resenting the implacable image of "man at the desk talking about himself." Coming and going, walking, down through the years of New York---outside the "bad museum," on the bowery with shafransky in '87, to the monstrous box, which I didn't really find funny, only brackish, like my own family's peculiar humor, and sad.
In early December, I passed Gray and some of his friends walking down 1st Avenue, seemingly in fine fettle. I looked at him, and he returned the look, as he always did: I think it was a theatrical impulse, since although I had seen him around often throughout the years, I never knew him. In the past, I had seen him gaze back with either intense and impersonal amazement, or with a glance of acknowledged common humanity. In December, I observed the look of doubt, and I thought, "oh, but he's better now. . ."
If I continued to search, I'm sure I could come up with better poems to use instead of my own clumsy voice. I'm posting one by W.S. Merwin (before he got "soft"), and one by Wallace Stevens, both fellow New Englanders.
Beggars and Kings -- W. S. Merwin
In the evening
all the hours that weren't used
are emptied out
and the beggars are waiting to gather them up
to open them
to find the sun in each one
and teach it its beggar's name
and sing to it It is well
through the night
but each of us
has his own kingdom of pains
and has not yet found them all
and is sailing in search of them day and night
infallible undisputed unresting
filled with a dumb use
and its time
like a finger in a world without hands
Disillusionment of Ten O'Clock -- Wallace Stevens
The houses are haunted
By white night-gowns.
None are green,
Or purple with green rings,
Or green with yellow rings,
Or yellow with blue rings.
None of them are strange,
With socks of lace
And beaded ceintures.
People are not going
To dream of baboons and periwinkles.
Only, here and there, an old sailor,
Drunk and asleep in his boots,
Catches Tigers
In red weather.