A Distance Apart

All his life a lover of music, Bill Mayer was especially moved by the great composers’

final works: among them, Schubert’s, Verdi’s, Richard Strauss’s Four Last Songs. He

wrote A Distance Apart in the last months of a long illness. Bill had always been a poet

of the wondrous, the evocative meanings of every day things, of the dailiness of

beauty and friendship and love. In his final poems, one finds a poet still in love with a

life he does not want to lose, an earth he does not want to leave in which everything

lives its amazing life, “all of us together, partners in the world.”