Michael Adams was a poet I knew in Colorado long ago. He hailed from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania—the hard core steel town of Homestead—and I’d lived there for a time, so we’d readily revel in the signature culture that emanates from the original Gateway To The Midwest, city of three rivers.
Mike was also a natural resources expert, mountaineer, and urban planner—versed and expert in the incomparably diverse, rich and spiritual lands of the great America West, to which at the time I was just awakening, having been born on the isle of Manahatta and grown up in the teenage wastelands outside of Boston where earth consciousness had been eradicated long, long before—though we were yet wild and fearless seafaring creatures.
Was hard for me when Mike shared his poems, for while they weren’t as horribly jejune and gender-obsessed as most others on the scene–and they certainly lacked the hack ego tactic of sex, drugs and shock content so prevalent then and now–they really never struck me as much of anything.
After a winter vacation in the Sierra Nevada and Redwood Forest, I moved to San Francisco and we promptly lost touch, which was all too easy for a vagabond in the days before email. Some years ago when I finally returned to the Rocky Mountains, I tried to find him via electronic sleuth tracking, a modern version of the tracking he and I might have pursued before the plague of the Information Age.
To my immense and everlasting sadness I uncovered his obituary. He died young and left a family, as the victim of multiple myeloma or incurable cancers of the blood and bone marrow.
Poets are born and bred warriors though and he fought the beast, did not go gentle, and stayed active in life including community affairs and the work of verse,
My sleuthing was conducted on the winter solstice so imagine how I responded to discover the following poem, a profoundly breathtaking and resplendent affirmation of nature, life and light by a truly good man who knew he was dying.
As fine and high as the craft gets.
Godspeed Mike, you did it—you touched the gold ring of poetry.
Peace Brother.
❏