For a friend I never knew. →[More:]I've been wanting to post this for awhile. Some time back, I went rumaging through old issues of The Writer's Chronicle for a poem about dogs in a shelter I wanted to use with my students. I couldn't find the poem, but, in the process, I stumbled upon a news release. A favorite poet of mine, Jim Simmerman, had committed suicide last June.

I first came to know Simmerman's work when I was doing some post-BA work at Miami University of Ohio and helping out at Miami University Press, publisher of two of Simmerman's later collections. I was close with the editor at the time, Jim Reiss, a fine poet and teacher in his own right (we've since had something of a falling out, which I deeply regret; my own arrogance and big mouth cost me many a friend). But Jim Simmerman feels like the friend I never met. I have great respect for the deep honesty and emotion in his work, and I always thought there was time. I had my eye on the annual writer's conference at Northern Arizona University, where Jim Simmerman taught, for just that reason. Or I thought I might one day attend one of those AWP conferences and run into him.

I suppose it's strange to grieve for someone you never knew, but in Jim Simmerman's honor, I thought I'd share one of my favorite poems of his, from his fourth collection, Moon Go Away, I Don't Love You No More. On long drives home from school, down narrow highways through Ohio corn fields, I'd see the high full moon following me and think of Simmerman's collection. He'd been ill, certainly, but I think there was more. When my juniors read the following poem, "Fly," a student remarked, "He sounds suicidal." Funny you should say that, I said. In any case, the world is indeed meaner and smaller without him. But he left us his work, and that's not nothing. You can also hear his voice and another terrific poem in this moving tribrute. If sometimes you feel like you just can't take another step:


FLY (by Jim Simmerman)


I wish I could sing like hummingbirds fly.
I wish I could hear the flowers.
One day the leaves on the aspen are green.
One day you tremble for hours.

One day you feel like a cross without tenure.
One day, like a kid with a match.
I wish I could just blow away like the clouds
or snuff all the stars with a breath.

I wish I could take back the last wish I wished.
But I can't, and I can't wish it harder.
One day the world doesn't matter so much.
One day it's meaner and smaller.

One day they dress you in clothes of glass.
One day they board up your eyes.
I wish it wasn't so far to fall,
wasn't so hard to fly.

I wish I could go where hummingbirds go
when flowers thud deaf on the lawn.
One day the leaves are waving goodbye.
One day the leaves are gone.