Some ringers: Dave Thomas, Robert Lee & Me
A friend of mine used to kid me about working the eulogy circuit just to get in on the free buffets, wondering if I scoped out the menus before I’d committed to writing something about the deceased. And that was our typical way of dealing with shit: loss, disappointment, and death—jokes and tears.
The first significant death in my life was a friend, 27. I was 26. I had been writing poems for myself and anyone who was interested. I often gave people poems as gifts for birthdays and anniversaries. And I’d composed some pieces for my grandparents who’d all died by 1979, but they were old and had led long lives. They were happy/sad deaths, expected. But when Potter died in a car wreck in 1980, it knocked me off my already insecure blocks. I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing in my life or what my direction or future plans were. I had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and drama with a high school teaching certificate. I knew I didn’t want to teach, so that meant I was moving from one job to another and wondering what I should do. The only things that were solid for me were my wife and my self-indulgent scribbling: what I called poetry.
So I wrote a poem for Jerry about Jerry, inspired by his life and death. Of course I wrote the poem “for” me. I had to write it. Another old friend of Jerry’s and mine read it at a gathering for Potter at the local watering hole because I knew I couldn’t get through it without breaking down. What I heard from so many in attendance, and for years after, was how much they appreciated the words, how they felt the poem captured Jerry and honored his life. They weren’t critics. They were the people that knew Potter, but that fact seemed most important to me. At that point I knew this was something I would continue to do for the rest of my life. I would tune into my life and try to capture my experiences in words, particularly words of love. I didn’t see myself as a “real writer of books” but I knew I could write for my community, the people I knew, and that’s all that really mattered to me.
Great Bear Memories, Forever —for Jarrett Potter (1953-1980) He is an Indian, a mountain man, sporting long hair and a beard, the earth is his temple. He has broad shoulders and a long thin body that narrows to the waist. His hips, legs, arms and hands are big and strong like Popeye's. He moves like a bear up and down hills and football fields, Rolling Thunder. He is that ideal blend of man and woman, as strong as a mule and as gentle as a kitten. He is a lover of all things. A romantic warrior defending the weak and respecting the strong. He is a hunter not a killer, always at home on a snow covered ridge at dawn or riding a swelling river in searching spring runoff, high, aware, intense and close, even now that he's returned to the mystical womb of mother earth, he is near. He is common sense, practical as a Montana winter, methodical as an old outfitter. He rages, he fights for truth and justice. He absorbs, he accepts what he can't affect. He reaches out and touches everyone, unlocking their secrets that swim naked in the warm pools of light that are the open eyes of understanding, his mother's eyes. Where he first found genuine, committed love, adrift in the sea of faces called life. The blank stares of a petty societal bent are slapped around and pushed into the Now and Love that is Jerry Potter, The Pathfinder. He is a force, a spirit so good that he was saved the pain of the coming years. A minority. He has walked in many other pairs of moccasins and judged not. A survivor. Money isn't important to Jerry. It comes, it goes. Greed he doesn't understand. He's the Wizard in his mountain home with a song for every man. Music makes him sing and his music inside radiates in everyone who stops to listen. And now he's free, unencumbered by physical form, to fly with the eagles, to wrestle with the bears and to know the true beauty that all men and women fall short of in their fear of living and dying together, alone. The generous teacher, a soft tutor in live, has filled his classroom in death. The hungry student, the great curious lover, has passed the test with honors. Not a perfect score but he never cheated. An honest man, one of the best. That's why it's so hard to see him go. I miss him so. He is unique in a “my society.” An unselfish man, a giver, a helper, an eternal brother and great bear lover. He is talented freedom oaring through my veins in cut-offs and sneakers, nose in the wind and twinkling eyes, smiling, a Marlboro pinched between his lips, chuckling a deep husky laugh as he bows into a wave, feeling the force of a million waterbabies grab and hold him, whispering life's secrets, then spitting him up and out into the sunshine screaming for one more, one more wave, one more football game, one more hunting trip, one more woman to love and time, one more euphoric moment before the game is over. Your time was good time, Jerry, and we know you haven't gone, for your monkey wrench glistens on moonlit nights reflecting what's important to romantic warriors, to newborn babies and to grandmother earth, besides, it's easier now, knowing that death is just a bear hug away. November 1980
The next one came a few months later when my next door neighbor and second mother died suddenly of a brain hemorrhage. I had grown up in her house playing with her son. We were like brothers. She was “our” mother, my mother’s best friend. That was another heartbreaker but different. Lois was 61. My friend, her son was 24. I felt her death from multiple points of view. She played a larger role in my family. I would be a different poem to write. What I found was a guilty pleasure recreating her. And again the response from my community was overwhelming. I felt like I was channeling these people.
I’ve always felt lacking or nothing special as an individual. I can probably justify blaming my dad for that, but we won’t get into that now. What I have always felt good about was playing on a team. I like working on a team, being a part of a group that accomplishes something together. I like being part of the tribe, the community. A poet friend of mine told me he likened me to Allen Ginsburg in regard to how I’ve supported the poetry community by helping poets into print and organizing events that included many poets. As soon as the wave of flattery subsided, I understood it. It’s just who I am. I’m a team player, the kid always trying to get a pick-up game going, calling other kids to meet at the football field at the same time. A year out of high school, I was working as a janitor at my old school and asked if I could use the stage for a summer theater project, contacted my drama-geek classmate who was still around town, and we held auditions (begged friends) and performed three one-act plays to full houses. I knew things were always better when done with a group of friends. Flying solo looked too hard, too lonely to me.
In the next few years things changed dramatically. The railroad in that small railroad town disappeared. Many people left. A major derailment of the community. We had a child, I wrecked a semi. No one died, and I decided to go back and get an English degree. We left Alberton and began a life as parents. I taught high school for the next decade. We lived for six and seven years teaching in Augusta and Ronan respectively. And while I found less time to write for myself when I was teaching full-time, I recognized myself as the same team player I’d always been: teaching classes, coaching teams, and directing plays, and being part of a faculty, a group of teachers who became friends.
The pivotal change in my life happened in 1993 to 1994. I experienced a series of significant deaths that warranted my communal need to eulogize. In July, September, December, and March I lost Al Manuel, Tom Heck, my father, and Bob Bryant. At each service I read a eulogy, and at each I was thanked profusely by all who knew and loved each of them. Al was so widely known in Montana that thousands of people attended his service. People I didn’t know were approaching me with tears and smiles thanking me for the words. That made an impression. Then when Tom unexpectedly took his life in September, and I read the piece written for him, another English teacher, friend and relative told me, “this is what you need to do. This is your calling. You need to do this, whatever it takes.” And she fucking meant it. When Margaret meant something, you knew it. I was heartened and a bit taken aback by what she said. She knew how difficult it was for an English teacher to squeeze anything into a career that demanded everything. So I was really thinking about how I was going to pull off spending more time writing and still make a living for my family. Then in December my dad decides it’s time to die. He’d been working at it for a long time. His body was shot and he had no intention of trying to slow his slide toward the grave.
Moon Song The falter of my father's breathtaking erodes the starched-antiseptic smell of St. Patrick's, a snarl he's tried to avoid. Those raspy, struggling gasps hurdle me into his dark bedroom years ago: closed doors, his snore, the reeking weight of trespass— a chill, sharp, medicine-sweet blast of whiskey and stale cigarettes. He told me one time in the Palace Hotel bar, there are places you shouldn't go. Blood is no license to walk the roads he chose to travel alone. The hard silence of coma, this jaundiced departure, seems scripted for the distant island of a man I've known and never known. I clutch the side rail of his bed, watch his ravaged body labor for air. The cave of his toothless mouth portends the journey beyond our words. Sun blazes through the hospital window. Roof-tops and trees outside, below, cling to their coats of glistening frost late in the afternoon. Cold, winter is upon us. Inside blue phrases echo, lap like flames: It's okay; go ahead; you can go. White sheets, my knuckles, the clock on the wall, swirl, swim clean into sound, into rhythm, into light. This chant, the drum of the one full heart, is a moon turning in an endless sea. I am son and father, forever rising and falling simultaneously. 1996
Another Dream Team: Vic Charlo, Roger Dunsmore, Ed Lahey, and Dave Thomas.
By the time Bob Bryant, a fellow teacher in Ronan who had been in a wheel chair since high school, came to the end of his life due to health complications, I was barely making it through a school day. I was coming apart at the seams. I finally went to a therapist in Polson who helped me understand that my anxiety and depression were natural responses to what I’d experienced and that I wasn’t going to die. She assured me I was healthy and time would help me through this along with a little med I took for while. She was right. But it was just what the cosmos ordered for me. I knew what I had to do to live the life I needed to live. I joined the poetry team. It’s what’s good for me, to believe I’m here for you, to keep spewing out these views from a (self-centered) team player. The big lesson in my life was figuring out that if I didn’t take care of myself, I wouldn’t be any good for anyone else which would really fuck things up for the team, whichever team. And life is nothing but teams . . . if you’re lucky. I can still hear Mr. King in my head from 5th grade basketball.
BASKETBALL Lay ups (always off the glass) chest pass, bounce pass, three man weave, high post, low post, give and go, split the post, pick and roll, go to the ball, screen away, run the play. Pass it, pass it, don't hold the ball. Block out. Get out of the key. Take the open shot. Follow your shot. Crash the boards. Get position. Use your butt. Don't go over their backs. Pivot, pivot, clear defenders with your pivot. Elbows out, the ball close to your chest. Look for the outlet. Throw a crisp pass. Get your ass down the floor. Think Defense, DEFENSE. Move your feet. Hands up. Shift the zone. Move it, MOVE it. Get on that man. Use the base line trap. Don't reach in. It takes five guys to win. Mistakes happen. Recognize them & let go. Control the flow. The game moves too fast to dwell on the past. Forget it. Don't blame. The divided team, the divided player will lose. Play together. Move the ball. Set good screens. Think. Use the fake, drive the lane. Remember, tough defense & rebounds win games. Practice the game. Trust each other. Love takes practice. Practice love. Heart sweat, hard work, swims the river Joy, a leap of faith that carries you away into the zone of unity you can never lose. No one can take that from you, no scoreboard, no court, no school. In that place, in that space, to be one as a team, is the reason we play this game.
Thanks, Mark another great piece.
Go team Gibbo! Pick and roll until the final buzzer sounds.