I would not even have known of his passing had a small item failed to catch my eye at the bottom of a compost pile of much more important news links...
Well, not really all that important. Not important at all, actually, not in the great cosmic all. Just a slag heap example of the world spinning on annoyingly - Black Friday brawlers, Bill Cosby, "Snooki's 'Gatsby Themed' wedding...
I can't claim to be especially familiar with Mark Strand and his work, with the exception of one poem, "The End", which I read when I was seventeen and was moved to long thoughts. I read it now, in these times when the world sometimes seems to spin more monstrously than annoyingly - Black Friday, Cosby and Snooki traded in for Ferguson, ISIS and Ebola - when death is less of an abstraction, and no longer the least bit intriguing, and I am moved to tears.
------------------
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he's held by the sea's roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he'll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he'll discover instead,
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
- Mark Strand
