In April, Jeffrey Harrison '80 was named one of only seven John Simon Guggenheim Fellows in poetry. Harrison, who is currently the Roger Murray Writer-in-Residence at the Phillips Andover Academy, has already published two volumes of poetry. His Guggenheim Fellowship will support his work on a third. In this poem, first published in Southwest Review, Harrison offers a wistful ode...

To an Old Friend

The alumni office has you classified as "lost and frozen" You had already grown a little cold, as I recall, before you disappeared years ago -- but frozen? It makes me think of you as a lump in some remote snowfield, cryogenically preserved exactly as you were when I knew you. I see myself now climbing the glacier and digging you out with a pick-axe, then hauling you by sled back to our dorm room where, late at night, we huddled over Rimbaud or Keats, an ember passed between us. "Nothing new from nowhere spirals blue" began one of our collaborations, as if we knew

nothing would come of our desire to breed visions from thin air and words. Just as nothing will come of my attempt to bring you back to life: you've changed in ways I can't know, your age, like mine, doubled. I knew that, of course, when I called the alumni office, before their phrase sent me off in another direction. I wanted simply to see you again. I wanted to say I have good memories and am sorry if I was the cause of any that are not. I wanted to make you remember those days, how we made that room glow. I wanted to thaw you out.