Every­one who knew Craig Arnold has a story, and Craig knew a lot of people. Walk­ing around in public with him was often exhaust­ing: every­one wanted a kiss. So I am one of many who loved him, and this is only one of those stories.

I met Craig when I was six­teen, at a bad party with bad boxed wine. There were people all over the room who referred to them­selves as poets, includ­ing myself, but I knew Craig was the real deal: all six feet of him said so. He stood cuffed in leather from head to toe––hat, jacket, pants, and boots––smoking cig­a­rettes and regal­ing people with tales from Spain, from whence he’d just returned after a year on the Amy Lowell fel­low­ship. He was cocky, wildly ener­getic, hand­some, and sweet.

In the years that fol­lowed we became friends. He was always enor­mously gen­er­ous to me in those days, when I’d show up at any down­town poetry read­ing I could get a ride to and force him to read my poems. He was then fin­ish­ing a PhD at the Uni­ver­sity of Utah, but I think that he was mostly bored with that process. He just wanted to read and write, and he wanted to spend time with his other love: music. Craig’s band, Iris, went through a number of con­fig­u­ra­tions over the years, but I was lucky enough to be part of the final one. (Below is a remark­ably cheesy pic­ture of us some­time in ‘98 or so. Craig included this along with a demo and press clip­pings when he gave kits to bars and clubs.)

In ret­ro­spect, the years I spent play­ing music with Craig and Joel and Shawn, three friends I’ll always hold dear, mean much more than I could then have imag­ined. We sweated and drank and sang together in some very strange places at very odd times of day and night, includ­ing the leg­en­dar­ily fuggy Salt Lake dive, Burt’s Tiki Lounge, where we played every Friday. This is obvi­ously exactly the fan­tasy of every “angry” sub­ur­ban teen; I was in heaven.

Behind the mic, Craig was in his ele­ment, as anyone who knew him can no doubt imag­ine. Who was this man? Who wrote these lyrics? As in the poems and in life, espe­cially in those days, Craig was an ardent provo­ca­teur. Plea­sure of any kind (food, sex, et cetera) was his idol, and he writhed around stage star­ing people down and belt­ing out its songs. Some­times, though, instead of fol­low­ing us off for a break or after a set, he’d stay and sing by him­self–some­thing simple and beau­ti­ful, often a Jeff Buck­ley song. In those moments he would reduce the room to silence. His poetry read­ings were like that, too: a com­bi­na­tion of unlike, strangely beau­ti­ful tones. He could write an elegy, for exam­ple, that includes a very pre­cise, comic descrip­tion of expert cun­nilin­gus (”The Power Grip”); and it made you want to cry to hear him read it.

I last saw Craig in Feb­ru­ary when he passed through Chicago on his way back from Colom­bia, where he had also been hiking vol­ca­noes. It is fit­ting that we spent the evening eating Span­ish food with good dirty Grenache and grappa, for Craig liked noth­ing more than that. He seemed hap­pier than I remem­ber him at any other time, and that struck me. I know that this had a good deal to do with his (beau­ti­ful and tal­ented and gen­er­ous) part­ner, Rebecca Lin­den­berg. I think it also was a sign that he had put away cer­tain ghosts. In pre­vi­ous years, when we’d drink and com­plain about con­tem­po­rary poetry, for exam­ple, he’d throw his hands in the air. This time, he talked about poems in a dif­fer­ent way, from what felt like an entirely dif­fer­ent van­tage. He said some­thing that stood out to me only later: that we shouldn’t worry so much about whether poems matter or not, because they do matter, and that people will real­ize it again when they real­ize that all poems are love poems. I think he meant that people matter, that we write for each other, and we should remem­ber that.

To Craig, I raise my glass. I will miss him dearly. Let us keep his words close.

UBI SUNT . . . ?
(from Shells, 1999)

You’re dead, poet who could smooth
the lan­guage like a sheet over
the body of a dying lover,
who made me real­ize how soothe

meant show the truth. That was the weight
you bal­anced lightly on your tongue.
Too young, too crude, or too high-​strung,
I under­stand at last, too late

to tell you, how much you’ve impressed
on me, my brain’s wet clay––your thumb
has ridged and whorled, your fin­gers drum
tight little rhythms still. A guest

in the House of Poetry, I slipped
down­stairs at night to raid the fridge
and won the unearned priv­i­lege
of watch­ing you, with a manuscript,

thin rows of syl­la­bles and strip
the bottom leaves of raw green shoots
to graft onto the black roots
of words––there, one firm fingertip

teases the gold leaf to lie still
along the bowed branch and the stem
of the first letter. Here’s a gem
set in the ink-​trussed windowsill:

a flower, a Greek name, a blue
wil­lowware cup––all your hoard
is drawn out, piece by piece, and poured
into the hollow of a U.