Strand passed away two weeks ago. I had first come to him many years ago when I was too young to relate to him, to what one critic called his "polished detachment." I came again several years ago to find someone whose always intensely personal introspection about the world and his place in it was something I in my years had come to understand and share. Many of his best poems (in my opinion) are too long to post here; instead this brief one and one of my favorites.



My Name

Once when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass,
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become and where I would find myself,
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.