How many guys are sitting at their kitchen tables

     right now, one-thirty in the morning, this same

time, eating a piece of pie?—that’s what I 

     wondered.  A big piece of pie, because I’d just

finished reading Ray’s last book.  Not good pie,

     not like my mother or one of my wives

could’ve made, an ordinary pie I’d bought at the

     Tops Market in Oneida two hours ago.  And how

many had water in their eyes?  Because of Ray’s

     book, and especially those last poems written

after he knew: the one about the doctor telling

     him, the one where he and Tess go down to

Reno to get married before it happens and shoot

     some craps on the dark baize tables, the one

called “After-Glow” about the little light in the

     sky after the sun sets.  I can just hear Ray,

if he were still here and this were somebody 

     else’s book, saying, “Jesus,” saying, “This

is the saddest son of a bitch book I’ve

     read in a long time,” saying, “A real long time.”

And the thing is, he knew we’d be saying this

     about his book, he could just hear us saying it,

and in some part of him he was glad!  He

     really was.  What crazies we writers are,

our heads full of language like buckets of minnows

     standing in the moonlight on a dock.  Ray

was a good writer, a wonderful writer, and his

     poems are good, most of them, and they made me

cry, there at my kitchen table with my head down,

     me, a sixty-seven-year-old galoot, an old fool

because all old men are fools, they have to be,

     shoveling big jagged chunks of that ordinary pie

into my mouth, and the water falling from my eyes

     onto the pie, the plate, my hand, little speckles

shining in the light, brightening the colors, and I

     ate that goddamn pie, and it tasted good to me.