Mark Strand, in Memory

One of the pleasures of being the child of a teacher or professor or mentor, in whatever field, is the one degree of separation one can find oneself from highly accomplished people out on the landscape of life.

As a child I watched my father, in particular, in his relationships with clever, brilliant people, who were for a short time learners from him, and then moved on. Both intact--but both enriched from the time they shared.

Mark Strand was not quite one of these people--he was my father's contemporary, not his student, but he came and went through my life with some feeling of this curious, transient intimacy that I got to witness before I was able to understand.

" I am not thinking of Death, but Death is thinking of me.
He leans back in his chair, rubs his hands, strokes
his beard, and says, “I’m thinking of Strand, I’m thinking
that one of these days I’ll be out back, swinging my scythe
or holding my hourglass up to the moon, and Strand will appear
in a jacket and tie, and together under the boulevards’
leafless trees we’ll stroll into the city of souls."

Man & Camel, 2002

Mark Strand Appreciation

(Photo via a BU site that rambles, rather, about Mark's relationship with visual art and language.   That's Mark on the left and the painter Neil Welliver on the right--I can smell the paint and summer heat of Welliver's studio as I look at this picture, remembering them both, so vaguely, as much younger men)

A personal loss, but OUR loss too.