Peter Everwine, the wonderful poet and lovely man, died on October 28th of this year. It’s a big loss, most immediately to the Fresno poetry community, and also to the wider community of poets and writers. In the wake of his death, there’s one grace note, one gift of good timing. Peter’s last reading, on September 12 at Respite on the River, was beautifully filmed and is available here. Peter was a banjo player as well as a poet, and the film opens with a trio of musicians, including Megan Mohigian–who told me about Peter’s death, sent me the link to his reading, and introduces him here. The reading itself begins at 6:22.

My semester as Distinguished-Poet-in-Residence at Fresno State was one of the best times I had during my years of teaching as a visiting writer, and meeting and spending time with Peter was one of the highlights. The poetry community there centered on Phil Levine and his lovely wife Franny, Connie Hales, Chuck Hanzlicek, and Peter, and radiated out from there to include other poets and writers, students in the program, and others just drawn to the conversation. I’d read and loved Peter’s first book, Collecting the Animals,early on, and the man behind the poems turned out to be charming, funny, sly, warm, lovely. In the copy he gave me of his book Working in the Song Fields: Poems of the Aztecs, he wrote “for Sharon–These songs–not Monk or Mingus, but no moldy figs either. Much love, Peter.” The subtitle above comes from a blurb by Ed Hirsch on the back of from the meadow: Selected and New Poems, published in 2004, and I can’t imagine a better description of his work. I’m including a couple of favorites here, but I urge you to watch him in person. And stay to the end to see a beautiful picture of Peter as a young man playing the banjo.

A SMALL STORY

When Mrs. McCausland comes to mind
she slips through a small gap in oblivion
and walks down her front steps, in her hand
a small red velvet pillow she tucks
under the head of Old Jim Schreiber,
who is lying dead-drunk against the curb
of busy Market Street. Then she turns,
labors up the steps and is gone . . .

A small story. Or rather, the memory
of a story I heard as a boy. The witnesses
are not to be found, the steps lead nowhere,
the pillow has collapsed into a thread of dust . . .
Do the dead come back only to remind us
they, too, were once among the living,
and that the story we make of our lives
is a mystery of luminous, but uncertain moments,
a shuffle of images we carry toward sleep—
Mrs. McCausland with her velvet pillow,
Old Jim at peace—a story, like a small
clearing in the woods at night, seen
from the windows of a passing train.

AFTER THE FUNERAL

We opened closets and bureau drawers
and packed away, in boxes, dresses and shoes,
the silk underthings still wrapped in tissue.
We sorted through cedar chests. We gathered
and set aside the keepsakes and the good silver
and brought up from the coal cellar
jars of tomato sauce, peppers, jellied fruit.
We dismantled, we took down from the walls,
we bundled and carted off and swept clean.
Goodbye, goodbye, we said, closing
the door behind us, going our separate ways
from the house we had emptied,
and which, in the coming days, we would fill
again and empty and try to fill again.