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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