Mattie's Pillow

Tomorrow, friends of Joe Enzweiler gather at the Dog Musher’s hall to remember him and celebrate his life.   It’s been six months since he slipped into the cosmos–and it still seems to me that he will pull up in his rusty Toyota pickup, smelling of stale woodstove smoke, carrying papers under his arm for an evening of reading and food and wine and talk.   Today, in a pre-memorial, I sat with a friend and threw some birch leaves into a small fire–scrap wood and a many-armed spruce root burning in a newly-built fire pit.  We sat in silence, mostly, and I thought of how the memories we leave each other create a unique “self” in the minds of those who care about us when we are separated by distance or time or the great infinite.

So, to celebrate the lives of poets gone on ahead, find a line you like from a poet you like and take the words and toss them into a new poem.  Your words, your images, built on theirs, as we truly do in any community of writers, artists, friends.

I’ll try it and post my poem.  Send me yours and I’ll add it here.

This entry was posted on October 14, 2011 at 11:31 pm and is filed under Poetry Challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.