Bill sent this to me, Feburary 17th 2016, hoping that I might help him find a publisher for his last batch of poems. Below is the title poem. RIP good Pearly Bill. love, Nicole

 

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

 

 

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