Ring of Bone

Several weeks ago I was overcome with grief, thinking "it's as if someone I know has died" but saw no news that confirmed it or who it might be. This evening I was browsing among names of my Facebook contacts who'd been absent from my feed for a long time, and found that my old friend Forrest 'Glenn' Rhodes from our Army high school in Paris, France, died on October 15 (Glenn and his date are on the far left in this photo of our senior year's "Sweetheart Court;" I'm on his left next to my senior year boyfriend Bruce).

 

Glenn hadn't been able to attend a long-awaited high school reunion in Washington D.C. in 2001, so he invited me for a week's visit to his home in Wapiti, Wyoming that summer.

 

Both in our early sixties, we caught up on our 40+ years since high school graduation, enjoyed fly-casting, horseback riding, beautiful views, poetry, jazz, and Indian flute music.

 

 

Retired from his later career as a Pan Am pilot, Glenn was an environmentalist who'd been closely involved with the Blackfeet and Kainai/Blackfoot Nations, and while he loved hunting it was never for sport; he cooked most of our meals while I was there and some of them included meat he'd caught himself. 

 

Glenn had played in our high school band and after graduation had spent time as a jazz musician in San Francisco, made friends with some of the beat poets, especially Lew Welch, whose work I'd not known about before.  

 

From Ring of Bone: Collected Poems of Lew Welch:

I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the clear stream

of all of it

and vowed,

always to be open to it

that all of it 

might flow through

 

and then heard

"ring of bone"where 

ring is what a

bell does

Happy Hunting, Glenn Rhodes.