My friend Bryan Cather died on January 4, 2020 at the age of fifty-three. I attended his Memorial at St. John’s Church the following Saturday and read a poem about my memory of him afterwards. At the end of the festivities, Richard Egan from the St. Louis Friends of Scott Joplin asked me for a copy to publish on the Friends’ website. As we were obliged to quarantine soon after, I forgot to look for my poem until recently. Unfortunately, the Friends’ website has moved around in the past months. Perhaps as a consequence there’s no permalink I can post, and now the poem has disappeared entirely. But you can find the video of Bryan to which I reacted at the bottom of his obituary, here. And here’s my poem, just to provide a permalink. Thanks to the Friends of Scott Joplin for publishing it first.

Ragtime Stride
–for Bryan Stewart Cather, 1966-2020

So, you’re gone now–
and I’m chastened to have missed
your company these last years

remembering you knelt
by my pew, welcomed me to church
all those times ago, and we marched
one year together in the pride parade.
I recall you waved a flag along the way.

I don’t know how to put this
but I knew you for a savant,
and when you started back to school
I cheered you on and took some almost
personal pride to see you come
into your own.

Too, I knew you
for a man like me, who favored hats
fedoras fall and winter,
straw boaters spring and summer,
a jaunty man–

and, surprise, I knew you
for a fellow ragtime traveler.
My old upright, the one you
rebuilt me still sits
in my dining room. I watched
you level the old keyboard with felt
washers, but you couldn’t tune it.
Like me you couldn’t even play,
though that was okay–

because you stepped to a different music
all your own. Maybe, I sometimes thought
you were first attracted to players
and the old piano rolls you loved
because they gave you the piano
of your dreams.

Now, your obit shares
video of you playing Tree-
monisha’s close, that “. . . Real
Slow Drag.” I watch you pedal
forth and back, striding
through its rhythms’ chorus bare feet slap
some mythic hardwood floor–

marching onward, marching onward,
happy as a bird in June . . .

You’ll teach it to angels in Heaven.