Ron Smith 

with apologies to W.H. Auden 

I 

He disappeared in the heart of Christmas: 
Delivered beer froze on the porch, airports emptied  
By decree and COVID, spasms of virtue toppling
Old South Confederates. Chewed corpses stank
In the mouth of the dying day. We who knew him
All agree the night of his death broke to dark cold day.  

Far from his wheelchair the jackals ran on 
Through Southern swamps, and coast
To coast desperation drove us store to store;
Caroling tongues kept the death
Of the poet away from his poems.  

For Stoneback it was his last day as Stoney,
A day bereft of nurses and doctors.
Something in his body revolted, 
Clearing the barrooms of his mind.
Silence fell in Paris cafes. Tall tales
Stammered. Then trailed away. Stoney 
Became his admirers.  

Now he’s scattered among a hundred colleagues, 
Wholly given over to affectionate inaccuracy,
To find his happiness in another kind of conference 
And be examined under a foreign code of conduct.
The words of an outsized man modify
The tongues of the living.  

But in the insults and noise of tomorrow 
When politicos roar like beasts on the floor of Congress, 
And the righteous have the sufferings to which they are resigned,
And each in the cell of himself almost believes his care courage, 
A few hundred will think of Stoney as you think
Of a night when you sang drunk around a glorious campfire.  

We who knew him all agree 
The night of his death broke to a dark cold day. 

II 

Your gift survives in your remembered rumble,
Physical decay, years wheelchaired.
Crazy America hurt you into wanderings, emperors
In Antarctica, gunfire off the coast of Yemen. Now,  

America has her harmless crazies and her killers, too.
Neither projectile nor Kevlar, poetry makes 
Nothing happen, something. It survives in
The hard drive of its making where timid bureaucrats
Would never want to tamper, flows on like the Seine
From rabbit holes of rhyming and the empty urns 
Of forced elegies, villages in Idaho, Pennsylvania,
New York, birthing then exiling their Ezra Pounds. 
Verse survives, a raconteur with blue ironic eye, 
a mouth pronouncing poems.  

III  

Cyberspace, transform our honored guest,
Precious stone on a dead man’s chest.
Let the All-American vessel sail
Unburdened by the dean’s junk mail.  

In the nightmare of our marketing
Are all the dogs of academe barketing?
With the campus flags half-mast
A dozen quips are stuckéd fast.   

Academic disgrace
Stares from every administrator’s face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.  

Follow, Stoney, follow right
To the pinnacle of light,
With unrestrainéd voice
Make us to flat-out rejoice.  

With the larking of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of our hyperbole
In a flood of purest glee;  

In the angles of the joke
Let the healer start to poke,
All our ribs xylophonize
Lifting our laughter to the skies.