Leo dies.

Not today
Not amidst the chalk marks, stickball bats,

not unlike the silence in a zoning photograph,

the slanting rays of light, the roar
of the echoing El not four
blocks distant, the light that pours

through open slats.

Not the family summer house, the towers

of books, the folklore.

The June showers.

The Adriatic not far distant
and the sinewy trees. The path overgrown.

The long bicycle-walks superimposed against a now
distant sky.

The trailing grasses. The early, green apples.

From earliest childhood,

July. No, August. Not the picnic's distant laughter,
empty swings swaying,
the hide-and-seek games toward summer's end
and soon nothing remaining.

The clover covered with frost.
Not biding one's time

in a bank, perchance to dream, imagine

through beveled glass... the remaining voices trail
off.

Not the uncertainty.

Not now, not 1948.

Not man's fate.

The hundred and hundreds of flowers,

The targets and flags

not for sale. Not slow to forget.

Not to know. Not to be looking.

Not sleight-of-hand,

the plotting and scheming backrooms.

Not the darkness at noon.

Not...not because the alarm goes off

and everything is where it was,

and it's later now. Not nearly a century.

No special privileges. Not the art.

Not to see it coming. Not today.

--Gerard Malanga

Obituary in the New York Times, 1999