Erasures 
Mark Ford
Donald Justice, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78, was one of the most subtle and enchanting American poets of his generation. In ‘Variations on a text by Vallejo’, a poem anticipating his own demise, but written some three decades before it, he pictured gravediggers burying him in Miami (his home town):
And one of them put his blade into the earth
To lift a few clods of dirt, the black marl of Miami,
And scattered the dirt, and spat,
Turning away abruptly, out of respect.
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Mark Ford teaches in the English department at University College London. This year he has published editions of the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery.
Other articles by this contributor:
The Style It Takes · John Cale
Love and Theft · plagiarism
Red makes wrong · Harry Mathews
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