A shocker!

Working on this I found out a favorite poet had passed. Sigh.... Great poet and a real fixture in Northern Arizona. Some how his passing fits in with this eventually finished blog. I had to share one of the poems he shared with some high school students from a time that seems a million years ago. Damn, the man was only 54 years old! We only visit any world for a short duration of time, why not make the best of it? :)


FETCH
1. The marrow of it's this:
that night after night I dream
you alive, dream you clawing
up and through the snarl
of spade-lopped roots and loam,
through the cairn beneath the pine
in a bower of pines, a wildwood
of pines, beneath a wheeling moon --
shaking from your body
the tattered blanket, shaking
from your throat the collar
of blood -- the ball
in your moth where I left it,
your coat wet where I kissed it --
breaking through underbrush
onto the trail, tracking it back
to the tired-rutted road --
loping now, running now --
your nostrils flared
and full of the world --
ignoring the squirrel,
ignoring the jay, ignoring
the freeway's litter of bones - -
night nearly dead as you
bolt for the lane,
up the drive, into the yard --
panting now, breathing now --
racing from door to window to door,
scratching at the screen,
whining at the glass, the ball
in your mouth -- Lo,
wouldn't I shake from this
sweet gnawed dream to rise
and fetch you in
with the light that returns
me day after day,takes you again and again.
-- Jim Simmerman, ca1989