Tribute to Keith Wilson from his dear friend Halvard Johnson:

Halvard Johnson sent this stirring tribute for his dear friend Keith Wilson:

Keith Wilson died the other day. He was a friend I've known since the mid-60s, when I spent some years living in El Paso while he was living in southern New Mexico: Anthony, right on the Texas-New Mexico border; then San Miguel, farther north, up the Mesilla Valley of the Rio Grande; and then Las Cruces. Any house of Keith and Heloise Wilson was full of music and wine and poetry, a caravanserai for poets traveling north or south, east or west.

Keith, at one stage of his life, often wrote of the sea, and his sea poems were among the best poems to come out of the Korean War. Here's one that's not overtly war related:

The Sea

"On the beach
the ocean ends in water.
--George Oppen
The Materials

The crisp line, taut, in all
intimations, thrown out, cork circling
the water, splash, my hand

reaching out

--the call, rightly named, these
Materials, the call is there
simple, demanding

response and a certain
attention to pulse, the
movement of whatever the work

asks of man--is that what
I'm trying to say, a man,
and how, sometimes, he doesn't

drown. Coming up spitting
salt water, safely past the
screws, it is a man
intact who waves

from the calm wake; behind
him the sea clear, oceans
held in place by a line.


And he wrote of dusty New Mexico
towns:

The Politicians

come
come here with full bellies
& shined shoes to the one street
of San Miguel, talking, waving
hands, their harsh gringo Spanish
shouted in the hanging dust
of the square

the men of the town
stand uneasy, aware of their hard
hands, the blue of the stranger's
eyes, their own mudcrusted boots
stiff with clay

they are ashamed these men
whose hands are strong with work & loving.
they listen. then go to the bar,
beer & red wine, juke box Infante songs,
his dead voice singing of a Mexico
which was sad, beautiful, but theirs
--riding free across a green land,
gritos on their lips & dead politicians
fall, one-by-one before their dreaming guns.

--both from Graves Registry and Other Poems
[New York: Grove Press, 1969]

Coincidentally, while 1969 did not mark the first publication of a collection of
poems by Keith Wilson, it did mark the first publication of a collection of poems
by me. And it was Keith Wilson who sat me down on his living room floor and
showed me how to put a collection of poems together. That first book that bore
a epigraph by Keith Wilson: "a sunlit unity / desperately sought" and contained
this poem written on the occasion of Keith's and Heloise's moving from Anthony,
New Mexico, to a big new (well, not new new) house in San Miguel:

Moving Out

for Keith & Heloise Wilson

saying goodbye
is no trouble:

a house is a skin
to be shucked

wriggled out of
room by room

closet by closet
until what remains

is piles of boxes,
a few empty hangers,

a heap of debris
on the kitchen floor

which never seemed so wide,
a neighbor's dog

who come to say goodbye
from a respectable distance.

fr. Transparencies and Projections
[New York: New Rivers Press, 1969]

--HJ

--

Halvard Johnson
================
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