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."