RIP Pearly Bill              August 17, 1943 – March 24, 2016                    love, Nicole 

Bill sent this to me February 17, 2016. It is the title poem of his unpublished manuscript.

SACRED HOURS

              We live in an old chaos of the sun.   

Wallace Stevens (‘Sunday Morning’)

Clean sheets of remembrance quake

in our forgetful folly. No one

quite knows enough. It is old,

being here. My ancestors gone.

What should I say of them?

Catholics, Freethinkers, Jews

of a certain stripe. Given

to producing family—one or two

or four ascendants made real

by a name. You are one of us,

compounding this fierce brevity

with hostility, rules, beliefs. But what if

(in all our uncanny outcry)

something made it known we love

all this chaos, this wild uncertainty

that fulfills these sometime sacred hours

Bill Pearlman