I cannot do justice to Tim’s many interests and careers here even if it were not late at night. Farmer, businessman; poet and student of poetry, vigorous with unfashionable rhyme and meter (it was said that under the tutelage of his Yale mentor, Robert Penn Warren, he memorized 30,000 lines of Greek and English poetry); adventurer, gay man, gun nut (a 28 bore on the prairie!); Catholic (as another Catholic writer, Michael Gruber, once put it, practicing and trying to be perfect, with no illusions!)
In a just world he might well have been poet laureate, and he was enviably productive too. His cancer diagnosis spurred him into writing at least four extra BOOKS!
He wrote the best poems on dogs of our time, and on our common mortality:
When the returning dove
roosts at your mother’s grave,
Ill bury a box of ash
beside her in the sod.
Vaya con Dios, love,
You were the dog of God.
Our fellow bird hunter, Catholic, and writer Jameson Parker called him “A Predatory Poet in a State of Grace.” Exactly right.
Oh and– for extra cool points: His childhood babysitter was Bob Dylan,
A lament for a man of dog: Loreena McKennitt doing Yeats' Ballad of the Foxhunter. This one's bringing tears to my eyes every time.
About a month before he died, Tim Murphy sent me this poem. He couldn't stop sending poems near the end, as if he were in a race to cast every last bit of lived life into words. He apologized, saying "This needed a lot of tweaks this morning, but now it looks really good to me." It looks just fine to me, as well:
A Gift for Friends
Gratitude for my friendships is a theme
running deep in the heart of every book,
much as a montane stream
leaps in a dream or trout leap to a hook.
My friends are few, fewer since Alan died,
for he was far more garrulous than I,
so easy when he tried
kindness to strangers near the montane sky.
Share sandwiches packed in a wicker creel,
trout amandine, our high Rockies’ cuisine,
line ripped from a reel,
food offered hikers in a trailside scene,
canteen Dickel offered and gladly taken,
campfire at dawn, a fine rasher of bacon.
Thanks, Stephen, for honoring a a great dog lover, a great poet, and a great man.