by Erika Butler

“I won’t be able to come this weekend, but I’ll see you next time,” you wrote. “It’s for a good cause, though. We’ll miss you — See you next time,” I wrote back. You believed it when you said it.
I believed it when I read it.

And I do miss you. When you aren’t around making the worst coffee I ever tasted, teasing me for my tea; growling your greeting with a kind of animal happiness; pulling the bottle of Tullamore Dew out of your slouchy overfilled travel bag, along with the book you know I need to read at the moment and the chapbook Tom should see, then going out to rummage through your truck for the rock you wanted me to have; chopping vegetables in the kitchen with the Hotel Caterers and then settling in on a stool with a wee sip and your guitar while others stirred pots.

At your memorial service as I sat in a room filled with hundreds of people — more in another room listening, after hundreds had already gathered a day before, all of us still surprised at your
exit — I unexpectedly heard your voice: “So this is what it took to get you here?”

At least you went out classy, doing what you loved, living that large bear life of yours, music and words and young folks around, with no regrets except maybe having to leave that old yellow dog behind. Regrets in this case are for the living.

We were supposed to visit your new writing shack and dammit you were going to finish off the studio on the hill. What about that?

We were supposed to have years to get frustrated with each other, friction rising, then talked away in a sidebar sotto voce — “We’re both being a bit too Irish” I’d say to you — and you’d smile; years to make eye contact over the struggle for the elusive phrase for some mystical knowing.
One of the last times I saw you I read your astrological chart: “There’s some big change coming that I can’t quite explain, big though, big change.” I remember you looking into the near distance for a moment, and then winking at me. “Ya think?”

by Gerard Grealish

I imagine you inviting strangers
into the fold, finding in the cut
of their words a grain that draws you
in, knots burned
from branches born of the mother trunk.

Beyond saw, axe, and chisel,
hammer and nail, I imagine you
discovering the wood; beyond the pen,
you find the wounds, open,

and dress them,
not with paint but the transparent
stain of yourself.
In the scars will be
the words.

by Betsy Sholl

Six months after you died, spiders fill the field,
gleaming in early sun,

having spun all night their bright God’s – eyes,
those faceted gems, airy prisms

beaming the day’s first light from stalk to stalk —
which soon the farmer will plow under, yes,

and three rowdy shepherds will tear through
like hell hounds wanting to be fed,

but still these spiders turn night’s fog
on their glittery looms, making

and remaking — as you would have said —
casting lines through the shapeless air.

by Betsy Sholl

Bird flash too quick — to sketch it
   I’d have to rush the line, long dash

like wind riffling the paper I am
   almost out of,

its thin blue bars already filled
with ink blot, blotch,

not hammer dance, dark ale,
voice of mud shine and tweed —

not you with man purse, beret,
   blue truck, big dog, more hair

than you knew what to do with.
   Crow man, bunion foot, more heart

than your body could hold,
   what’s left is the spirit whiff of you

your words contain, put down
   on rumpled sheets that say, Lovely,

lovely as it is, don’t mistake
   the sign for the place it names,

for the mystery it can’t.
   But Michael, passing Shays,

or that street by the dairy where
   you’d park, forgive me my dogself

that still would rather look at
   your rough fat – knuckled finger

than what it was
   always pointing to.