Michael Milburn
Ex Libris
For T.L., 1946–2017
As if indignant
at being viewed as dumb
after his habit of self-deprecation
led us take his poor-mouthing as truth,
he embarked upon a feat
of reading that perplexed
as much as it impressed—perplexed
for the books bored through
and impressed because
he’d really liked them.
Shirer, Gibbon, Macauley,
all of Francis Parkman
and Edel’s Henry James,
each enough to sate a speed reader’s summer,
and he wasn’t one,
he insisted with a laugh,
but a plodder to the end,
which came this week,
and set me trying to recall
his puckish, boyish squint
and imagine where they went
and what they meant, those words, and was all that erudition
for effect or professional pride
(he was a poet after all) or rather the opposite
of a pompous fool’s—he had it
and made it look as if he hadn’t.
When his eyes closed
for the last time,
enough sentences had entered his brain
to fill it, I thought,
altering little,
just something he did for the doing,
like a caught bird freed,
no other plan than that.
Michael Milburn teaches English in New Haven, CT.
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