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We need nothing but open eyes, to be ravished like the Cherubims. “Was da kooks-wit-wings,” returning home. Red-combed roosters clutched in a tree beside the track. In college, one guy wrote, “the chipmunk squirreled up the tree.” Why I remember that and not Blake. Tony wrote a poem about the Inside Out. He sat with me when I read the New York Times on the stairs outside my dorm. We had a night together that went nowhere, even in the moment. Later, the mutual friend he'd envied described his long love affair with the bottle, his two beautiful sons. A tall woman came up to me at AWP and said she was his love. I think I sent him my book through her. He died in Vermont this week. “Tony?” someone asked: the stubble on his face, the thrown back thin hair, his heavy lidded eyes. The week we read Bishop's “At the Fishhouses” he came to class carrying a pack of Lucky Strikes. His last call to her arrived on a Radio Shack cellphone. Corporations die like people. Some say they are. He was. I am.

RIP Tony Sanders

14 February 2015