People Who Died

Pat Dugan……..my grandfather……..throat cancer……..1947.
 
Ed Berrigan……..my dad……..heart attack……..1958.
 
Dickie Budlong……..my best friend Brucie’s big brother, when we were
                                                        five to eight……..killed in Korea, 1953.
 
Red O’Sullivan……..hockey star & cross-country runner
                                                who sat at my lunch table
                                                            in High School……car crash…...1954.
 
Jimmy “Wah” Tiernan……..my friend, in High School,
                                       Football & Hockey All-State……car crash….1959.
 
Cisco Houston……..died of cancer……..1961.
 
Freddy Herko, dancer….jumped out of a Greenwich Village window
     in 1963.
 
Anne Kepler….my girl….killed by smoke-poisoning while playing
                                    the flute at the Yonkers Children’s Hospital                         
                                    during a fire set by a 16 year old arsonist….1965.
 
Frank……Frank O’Hara……hit by a car on Fire Island, 1966.
 
Woody Guthrie……dead of Huntington’s Chorea in 1968.
 
Neal……Neal Cassady……died of exposure, sleeping all night
                                            in the rain by the RR tracks of Mexico….1969.
 
Franny Winston……just a girl….totalled her car on the Detroit-Ann Arbor
                                    Freeway, returning from the dentist….Sept. 1969.
 
Jack……Jack Kerouac……died of drink & angry sickness….in 1969.
 
My friends whose deaths have slowed my heart stay with me now.

Copyright Credit: Ted Berrigan, "People Who Died" from The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Copyright © 2007 by Ted Berrigan. Reprinted by permission of University of California Press.
Source: Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1994)