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Surprise Guests
Thomas R. Smith

We’ve just started our set at the Care Center —
that’s Krista, Ken, and I, AKA
the Housecats — when unannounced and unexpected,
in breezes Colin and his fiancée
Anna, and in glee I let out a whoop
and toss our set list in the air and let it
float to the floor because I know, as Colin
bends to unzip his mandolin case,
it’s all going to be different from what
I thought it would be only seconds ago.
Colin, who has been my musical brother
since he was in his teens, and who helped me
through the pandemic with our back yard jams,
who in his current bearded incarnation looks
a bit like George Harrison, steps to the mic
and we are off on the wings of that
great old country gospel song, “Keep on
the Sunny Side,” our voices all lifting
together, Ken keeping rhythm with his
washboard, and, as Krista puts it later,
there’s so much heart being manifested
here in our abandon to the music
that this feels like one of those “thin places”
where the veil shows through to that other side
where joy is complete and grief banished.
The way I’m picturing it is “heaven,”
where, when we finally breeze in with strings
blazing, ready to sing, God will likely
just whoop from the stage the way I did,
and throw his set list up in the air,
never to come down again, forever.

—
Thomas R. Smith is a poet, essayist, editor, and teacher living in western Wisconsin. He is the author of ten volumes of poetry, most recently Medicine Year (Paris Morning Publications), and has edited several books as well including Airmail: The Letters of Robert Bly and Tomas Tranströmer (Graywolf Press). His first prose work, Poetry on the Side of Nature: Writing the Nature Poem as an Act of Survival (Red Dragonfly Press), seeks to join imagination and activism in the nature poem.

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Have you read these poems:
Doe Hill, Late August, After a Storm by Robert Brickhouse
Humble Up by Mary McGinnis

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