I Stay Home

I Stay Home

is the title of a poem

by my colleague, friend and neighbor

Andrew Carrigan, recently

deceased (pancreatic cancer)

and I wanted to present that poem

here, and then write my own version

with the same title, but

I can’t find his poem,

even in the half-dozen of his books

or the unpublished manuscript

of his Complete Poems,

so instead I’ll have to venture

uninspired by his poem but only

by my memory of his spirit, his laugh

and his slanted joyful view of the world,

though come to think of it, I don’t

really stay home (I wish I knew

what Andy meant when he said it,

if he said it, memory being slippery)

though my radius has shrunk to

about 30 miles, with plans for 200,

but my reading, my memory/imagination,

Netflix and Kim’s 30,000+ photos

mean that I travel frequently

even while I Stay Home, with Kim

and now, here, with Andy.

The poem below I wrote about Andy about 30 years ago. It does, in fact, recount a dream. You may pick up a note of envy.

            Dreaming of Carrigan

You are a prisoner in a hotel in a

foreign country near the border

and we help you escape from the guards but

you are trapped on the fourth floor and so you

choose to leave by a window, crawl along

a thin ledge around a corner and

apparently jump, for from the beach below

you call up that flying is great

we should try it.

You escape but cannot leave it at that.

From your hideout in the sand dunes below

your shaggy earnest grinning head appears

to call poems up to us, new ones that you’ve

just written this morning, and we tell you

to duck, they are looking for you, but you

smile and linger enough to show us how

and then disappear to write us more for later.

You swim around the border to a city and

are being chased by police though the night streets

with a girl held in one hand, more poems in

the other as you turn the chase into

a romp though they are gaining on your

casual pace, broken by stops to show strollers

your poems and await their interested response.

You do not take the drama of the chase

as seriously as we want you to, or perhaps

you do, for when they catch you and

you are handcuffed, smiling, the girl gone, in the

back seat of the squad car, from your pockets or

from your hand itself spring new poems

which you keep showing the dutiful police

who read them as they guard you and drive

and admire them and discuss them with you

a genuine poet as they take you away.