After Thanksgiving your house goes up
for sale, but before that the things in it,
the ten thousand things not even counting
those pages we touched bringing your ecstatic
poems to light. Now the sale organizers
have assessed and laid out on tables
the books, chapbooks, broadsides, that trail
of radiant footsteps you left behind.

Soon they will disperse into the world,
carried by the hearts of others who cherish
the courage with which you faced the gods
of life and sent back your reports,
challenging, outraging, delighting in turn.
I feel a kind of fine agony standing
amidst your smoldering plenty, not giving up
having wished it to go on forever.

Thomas R. Smith’s 2022 poetry collection, Medicine Year, is available from Paris Morning Publications. He has a short prose book, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival, coming out later in 2022 from Red Dragonfly Press. He lives in River Falls, Wisconsin and worked as Robert Bly’s personal assistant for over 30 years.