Poet’s Notebook Peter Meinke illustration by Jeanne Meinke Credit: Jeanne Meinke

This has been a tough week. Creative Loafing, like LeBron James, has been sold to a Cleveland company, and we knew that heads would fall. It wasn’t a total surprise, but Jeanne and I will lose friends, including editor David Warner, who in 2007 got us writing our biweekly Notebook — eleven years without missing a single one, roughly 275 columns and drawings.

When I heard the news, I was working on a collaborative idea between Maureen McDole of Keep St. Pete Lit and Todd Bates of photography event Carousel for this year’s SunLit Festival. These two fine groups are dedicated to strengthening our literary and arts communities, respectively; and, not surprisingly, who’s helping with their project — bringing writers and photographers together — but David Warner? Each writer — including David — will look at a series of photographs from the Museum of Fine Art St. Petersburg’s archives and write an ekphrastic piece (a verbal response to a specific work of art), and read it as the photographs are displayed on a screen before the audience at the MFA on April 19.

Here’s my poem, about a series of 10 photos of a couple from another time taking a trip through Europe that includes staying in a tower, where something bad seems to have happened. The photos are mysterious, and I hope the poem is, too. They suggested to me a mix between the story of Adam and Eve and the disastrous trip to the country taken by Sally Bowles and her rich “benefactor” in Cabaret. So Jeanne’s tower hints at the magical but disturbing simplicity of a fable.

Thank you, David, for everything.

The Tower

Where has it gone the spark we held

so steadily unparalleled

in all the poems that we had read

Swiss villages we visited

the songs we sang as if propelled

by spirits that could not be quelled

with distance time or breath expelled

in careless words or words unsaid:

Where has it gone?

In the dreamstorm where we dwelled