It's been a couple of weeks since I heard the sad news that my former colleague, the poet Ted Schaefer, had left us. He was a good and generous teacher, and he always indulged me when I'd drop by his office unannounced and hang out, leaning in his doorway and asking him about his time in the army, his work as a former cartoonist, and, of course, about poetry. I learned a lot from him, including a thing or two about patience.
He wrote two books—After Drought and The Summer People—and published poems everywhere from the the old Saturday Review to the Village Voice. But the poem that came to mind when I heard of his passing was a little one I'd run across in a 1974 issue of Intro back when I was a grad student and worked in Chicago's great, much missed Aspidistra Bookshop. It was a journal associated with the AWP and published by Anchor Books, and it took me a while to get my hands on another copy:
Ed's Cafe: He's Dead
I
The coffee
Perks in the urns.
The forktips sing away.
A dawn hits
Ed's widow.
I hear
The breadman, and
II
"I want a red casket.
With blue flowers,"
I hear the woman say.
"I want to be buried
On a real bright
Shiny day..."
I'm sure Ted will be remembered with affection and gratitude by many, including his former students—among whom, in a way informal but real, I number.