In Memorium

For today's post I will forgo my usual subject matter to remember my friend Rodney T. Jack.

Rodney was a man I met my first day of graduate school at Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers. He quoted a line of my own poem prior to introducing himself to me.

He was an excellent poet and one of the sadder people I have known in my life.

Though I haven't seen him in years, his death and life have touched me in a way I hadn't expected.

I want to remember him as I do from when we first met: smiling, shy and excited to be a writer.

Here is a poem he wrote:

Stonefruit

To you whom I've hurt
not meaning to

I offer this plum this drupe
no shell but a thin skin purpled

I tender to your mouth the muscle
the sweet sympathetic scar-tissue

surrounding the stone the seed
which wants to be buried

Rodney was 43 years old and died on August 6, 2008.