between appearances, exploring remote trails,
weaving his way through deep New England woods,
observing the splendor of light among granite boulders,
in boreal gardens of calipso orchid and ladyfern,
where wilderness and the throat of summer were untamed.
Where intricate clouds of mayflies gathered
over a glassine pond reflecting the sky,
broken by lucky salmon leaping skyward,
and the concentric rings merged like Celtic knots,
an old rowboat riding low in the water,
with its tendrils of moss and pond scum
trailing like a threefold beard of wisdom,
and thunderclouds roiling on the horizon,
promising a storm, that other ink-stained darkness,
and something infinitely unnamable at the edges.
Starry-eyed I admired him from afar through his poetry,
through distances, and in workshops, something spoke
of a kindred language we shared that went beyond the page.
Perhaps it was our Irish blood recognizing long lost kin.
Each in the other, and all in one. Cromlech and dolmen.
Out of the blue, I invited him to do a poetry reading.
I remember how he arrived on the bus on Railroad Square,
how his books and his eyeglasses headed northward
in a satchel on the Seattle-bound Greyhound, sans tickets.
I wondered what someone would make of his poems
at the end of the line, would they toss out the books,
try on his glasses? See the world through the poet’s lens?
As I gathered up my copies of his books for the reading
he borrowed my car for the afternoon to visit the vineyards,
he was all elbows and knees in my old blue Bug,
that famous forelock of hair over a glacial blue eye,
He taught me to trust the veracity of Anglo-Saxon words,
that were uncomfortable in polite poetry schools,
that poetry itself was a dangerous traverse over “bauchy ice.”
He said to me, Listen to the awkward music of the generations.
You can’t quit writing, ever. The becoming and the dying
of life cycles is poetry, and the music of the poem is the poem.
I remember how he held me when I returned from the coast,
a friend, off his medication, had plucked out his own eye.
I stumbled blind in grief, fell over a stone wall,
how his hands held me up, and he offered solace
and animal comfort during a time when I could not see.
That night, in the dark, we were all thumbs and elbows.
The braille light of our hands bespoke an older story,
we had moved beyond the realm of mentor and student
into something akin to family harboring dark secrets.
When he returned home, his wife had enough—
a lifetime of wandering eyes, the last straw among many.
Did he return to the deep solace of the woods,
to measure dappled light splayed among the trees?
I heard he died alone in a hospital bed in a living room,
watching the slow progression of shadows cross the ceiling,
but his mind had wandered onto other wordless shores.
5/25 Write On! Terri Glass workshop
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