In Memoriam: Paul Zimmer

• I. The Visit
• For Paul and Suzanne Zimmer and Cele Wolf
• With sunlight pouring through the windows, March
• Retreats and winter’s windy shadows shake
• The shadows’ fruit from changing light. The lurch
• And sway of barren limbs (no leaves to speak
• Within the secret ear of spring) now cast
• Their shadows through the room. We visit there
• And lunch on whiskey’s fire – a sip, a taste,
• Enough to warm remembrance with desire.

• That afternoon your visit was a gift —
• To know that spring came early and put
• The bloom of meaning to books and birds.
• Our host, the town’s librarian, had laughed
• To think that here the dance of drink and thought
• Had found a way with words — a way to words.

• II. Soldiers Grove Stanza
• In Soldiers Grove, the Kickapoo has
• Entwined among its piney banks
• Both shady forms and greening mythos;
• Both take as motto: “Thanks–no thanks!”

• Where once the village taverns numbered
• In double-digits, floods encumbered
• The pour, and city fathers moved
• To move the village. Once approved

• The people cast their lot with science
• To capture solar-paneled fire
• On half a hill. Now higher and drier
• Than shining bottled self-reliance,

• Our thirsty tongues can yet recall
• How shadows made the sunlight fall…

• III. The Kickapoo
• For Bud and Katie
• A staked-out country rises up to stand
• With true inhabitants. The native state
• Of things is such that hope can immigrate
• From ignorance to undiscovered land—
• Beyond the claims that sinking fortunes spend
• On river silt. The hand imagines it
• Before the mind can hold its rich deposit,
• Or reckon miles of it by heart.
• The wind
• Can speak such fluid poetry. Its sound
• Can bend the Kickapoo with Jesuit
• Canoes. As chalice rests with calumet,
• A rambling river seeks to understand,
• Its shifting banks, bowed like divining rods,
• To tap into the common ground it floods.

• IV. Blessing for the House of Zimmer
• You were born of water’s hospitality
• And made your presence felt in all the corners
• That left the wintering shadows reeling.

• Not everything that falls to grave and floor
• Returns to dust — some things arise, sometimes
• Derived from sullen rains and salted fields,

• And ancient ways renew themselves, a floor,
• A foundation, wall and roof – a little bit
• Improves the lot and a bit of clearing waits

• For sunlight’s touch as gold that touches myth.
• Such is hunger, such is danger, such is greed.
• But Word and Meaning bear their child, A Gift—

• So three gods now come to introduce a hope:
• Where sunbirds sing, the rain won’t dare to speak.

Joseph O'Brien

Joseph O’Brien is the Poetry Editor for the San Diego Reader.