The Night I Finished Auden

The night I finished Auden    Was much like any night:A palatable meal had    Appeased my appetite,A sweating green-glass bottle    Provided companyFor Auden, in absentia,    And absentminded me.

I like the later poems,    Mannered and talkativeWith doctrinaire digressions,    For posing how to liveGracefully with the knowledge    That even the most wry,Intelligent, and gentle    Among us, too, must die.

Wystan, you mastered meters    For which I know no namesAnd thanked the god who gave us    Our grammar and our games,Then selflessly accomplished—    A born iconoclast—Your corpse, but left your corpus,    Of which I've read the last.

I feel like one who's wandered    Through hitherto unseenLandscapes, equipped with nothing    But compass and canteenAnd tasked by ghosts with finding    A form that could containAn elegy for oceans,    An epitaph for rain.