Poem or Book that I found in a thrift shop in Brooklyn NY

[ecafehcuod]

IV

For My Wife



Leafing through these pages, as I do now,

finding our legend in a ghostly phrase —

to Lillian—thinking of coming days

when readers read as I do: —knowing how



the love, the thought, the kiss, the worless vow

that holds us each to each in speechless ways

is lost already in this wordy maze

where we are only what cold words allow—



I say it's all unsaid and lasts nowhere.

And so we talk ourselves to double death

to live and die in lifeless words again,



shadows of shadows, even now bare

of everything but our abiding faith

to live in others, as I in Lillian.

https://imgur.com/gallery/vN4mm7a picture of the page

Comments

[delacourtings]

i know the book has already been found but i did some more digging and i'm even more sure quillori is right about it being sonnets of love and liberty.

i searched for the book on worldcat which lead me to a search-only digital copy from the hathitrust digital library where i searched some of the words from the poem (wife, lillian, and ghosted) and the results showed each of those terms was on the same page (page 21) so i'm pretty positive the poem is in that book.

you're right, it looks like his work isn't really available digitally but the places i saw selling the book seemed kind of shady (amazon had a listing for it for over 800 dollars but another site had it for about 6 dollars and neither had a picture with the listing) so you might be better off using worldcat to see if it's available at a library near you (if you just want to read the book and not own it)!

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you so much. I really don’t know how I would’ve found this book. I’ve spend countless hours trying to track it down.