Prepare My Shuttle.

Edward Hirsch and Marilyn Hacker, come on down, you're the two new chancellors of the Academy of American Poets. A strange position to hold at any rate (and nothing like being next to Bob Barker, or even Drew Carey, on The Price is Right), but here's a poem from Hirsch's latest book, Special Orders. I'll post some Hacker when my fingers thaw out and I get heat back in my apartment, which could be never, so if anyone else wants to assume the reins, by all means.

The Swimmers

-for Gerald Stern


We warbled on the muddy banks
and waded up to our throats in the Delaware River,

talking about Ovid washing himself in the Black Sea
and Paul Celan floating face-down in the Seine.

We swam arm over arm through the green silt
and coasted along on our backs, marveling and mourning

for Shelley drowning off the shore at Viareggio
and Li Po tumbling drunkenly into the Yangtze.

These were the strokes we praised, weren't they,
the butterfly and the crawl, the lullabies

we crooned on the first warm day of summer
in honor of the non-simmers Crane and Berryman,

in honor of Orpheus, whose butchered head
is forever singing above the choppy waves.