Elegy for Jess Tapper

Before the skies began to fall, I was told of nature’s

latest cruelty: your disappearance. I am glad you

aren't animate for this plague borne of inattention.

But this is no time for trouble, no time to double on trouble.

A madcap from some submarinal lake in Lewis Carroll,

a Blakean sincerity searing through all you wrote, all you did.

Would this wordsmith firebrand choose to be himself once more?

coose his own storm, the fitful alterations of his rain,

each drop a small planet weighed on and burnt

by a savage sun? And this from some foreign mist,

the why not quite known but the weather severe.

Driven but uncounted by commerce, a primordial

undestroyer of the world, filing poetic kernels by humble rivers.

But this is no time for trouble, of course: no time to double

on a least bit more trouble. Ending in circumstances

modest and hidden, possessed of a gratitude always abiding,

your terrible energy knowing itself to have a stronghold

in the verb's alchemy. What do they call us in French, or English?

How are we seen? Lunar phantoms, chimerical atom spills,

monks without cells; I’ll say it, though you never did.

You are the archetypal face a writer can incarnate,

and have uncomplainingly earned this to wear.

You were an independent artist, and this is singular.