"The Dolphins": a personal mourning

Sometimes I grieve more for the friends of the dead than the dead themselves: especially when friendship had sustained a vital need for communication. And in the case of the friend who needs desperately to hear the voice when vision has been all but taken away, & the accustomed call remains the only route to human contact there is, the sadness of her loss is all the greater.

Poet Betty Kaplan has recently passed away: a kind gracious individual with with whom I'd had the privilege of conversing in my Eastern days. A poet's death is always the occasion of irremediable loss. But what saddens me now is the thought that one person in particular, perhaps Betty's dearest confidante, can no longer feel, in her darkness, the link to a live poetic heart.

Fred Neil's song speaks the absence better than I ever can. I grieve for friendship's end.