i rob banks

is how i introduced myself to the poet james, & his wife leah, denboer upon our first meeting.  i don't remember the year of our first acquaintance but it was definitely before nick was born.  this was a poetry reading.  i was sitting behind the denboers at a Barnes & Noble & at the break both jim & leah turned around & introduced themselves to me.

i was a brash young budding rimbaud.  my head filled with verse.  everything about the art of poetry consumed me.  still does.  but the denboers were gracious, curious, funny witty, & erudite in a manner that displayed their learning lightly.

finally, they asked me what i do for a living.

i rob banks, i answered.

we hit it off.

today i learned jim den boer died at the age of 85.  our paths, after a couple of years of friendship, parted.  leah passed away a couple of years after nick was born.  i was a new father.  i stopped going to literary events.  

the last time i saw jim was at Ikea.  he was grief-stricken from the loss of his beloved wife.  we passed each other in the aisles until i walked up to him.  we said a few words, embraced, said we'd meet & catch up again.  & then we went our own ways.

jim is a damn fine poet.  at the time of our first acquaintance i was reading basil bunting.  i found bunting's poem 'the spoils' in an anthology & was blown away.  the city library had his collected.  man!  what music.  jim was amused by my ardor for bunting.  why?  he studied under the late british master.  in a poem published in jim's book dreaming of the chinese army [blue thunder books;1999] about bunting 'black tea' begins with these lines, 'There is an unpublished letter: "Of course I remember DenBoer/he seems like an intelligent bloke/though I can't remember why I thought that..."

85 is a good age.  i have not seen or spoken to jim for about 15 years.  i regret it.  for he was - is - a good man & a good poet.  he was also a good friend when i knew him.  his, & leah's, devotion to their black dog [subject of a sequence of poems] was near legendary.  they would leave events early to walk their pooch.  

we turn the death of others toward our own.  i am no different.  i am growing old too.  & i consider living to 85 a pretty good span of time.  i don't know the circumstance of jim's death.  i sure as hell hope it was fast & without suffering.  i think of other old rapscallion poets like ikkyu & t kilgore splake & jim denboer & i hope to be among their ranks.

but even if i don't this span of life is both long & too short.  the concluding stanza to 'black tea' is a fine summation of a life in poetry, "Trying to help, he brewed black tea in his leafy cottage/steaming, sweet with honey, and when he passed the cup,/I touched the hand that touched Pound's hand/and Yeats' and Ford's...beginning to try to learn the words/for stone, for mason's tools, for music, and the heart."  

i can find no better epitaph to the life & the art of james denboer.