Oscar Williams never took photos well in my opinion. How many times have I seen his body go into erect position when a camera was in somebody's hands nearby. It seemed as if suddenly war conditions would prevail! A camera was about to shoot at him! So into his literary persona he would go.

This is a rather good photo. Since it is in large format, it must have been a professional studio photograph for one of his anthologies, taken when in his fifties. The books in this photo are his anthologies, not his much slimmer books of his own poems.

The bow tie is typical. Oscar always tied his own bow tie, and wore it everywhere, even to the Cony Island beach, where eventually he would be overcome by a superior sun's rays and he would have to take off both jacket and tie.

Oscar Williams loved signing his books, and so this is a true-to-life picture for him. He would look at you, ask your name, write 'for So-And-So', and sign his name. Suddenly in the brief seconds an experience of immortality would unroll, because in the literary field an author signature makes a book last and last. And there on the same page is your own name, the nomenclature of your equally short existence here.

All writing and book publishing is humanity's defiance of death. Inside the covers of that book he is holding, ready to give it back to you, are mostly dead poets' words, written while alive, and passed on to you to enrich your life, and the life of friends, while you are still here in existence yourself. With a signature and a look right in your eyes by Oscar Williams you have become briefly immortal!!!

The following Elegy written for my mother is of course fifty years later, since when she died I was only twenty.

Yes, it has taken almost a lifetime to come to terms with my spiritual mother and honor her in this true way.

Embedded within the elegy are some of her life themes as I knew her. The loss, the hurt, even her madness, as when at my age three she was confined to a mental hospital. She left it after a year out of boredom. My parents never told me this story. I had to hear it from my father's woman friend, Jessie, after his death.

It is a formal elegy, as maybe elegies should be. I recite the elegy also in formal manner, with the proper inflection of word sounds to emphasize meaning and simple nobility. It is something of course that I would have liked to have recited at her funeral or graveside. But, alas, even that is gone to me now.

I know not, these fifty years later, where her grave site is now. Does she even sleep there still, my father by her side these forty years later? Or have they, the living, removed the last remains to make room for others? In essence, the poetry says it more, hers and mine and his, than a piece of simply earth with stone marker. Let us build all our significant graves in the hearts of the living. Then, let us ourselves move on ...