For Jack Collom

by Ed Sanders

We met in 1969
in the spring
at a reading at the
University of Colorado in Boulder

as part of a Resistance tour of poets
against the Vietnam War and the Compulsory Draft

I had just written “Yodeling Yippie”
and performed it

We met backstage and shared a common love
of Yodeling

Over the years we met, mainly during the summertime
Kerouac School sessions at Naropa

Now and then you sent me your compilation tapes of great Yodeling

One summer we wrote and performed
“The Hermit Thrush Yodel”

(it’s in the Naropa tape archives somewhere)

& over the years you mailed your prodigious
& brilliant sequence of poetry books!

Wow!  Then in recent years, you
were accompanied by an oxygen tank

and now
like Basho’s frog
you’re Gone

from Earth
into the Universal Pond

but not our Souls
O Jack Collom!