John Guzlowski has a new poem about the first writer he ever met, Paul Carroll, in Ode to Paul Carroll. The piece discusses Mr. Carroll’s influence on John’s writing and life. A great question – Who is the first writer you met (or the first person of significant influence on your life choices)?

Here’s Paul Carroll discussing history and human dignity in light of Catholic faith:

You, Gulls, Three Ghosts by Paul Carroll

Hard
spring
here. Sun seldom
sleet &
the rawboned winds.

But I see you in Paris, dear,
rummaging around the Flea Market
as if you’re searching for that Russian petticoat
embroidered by your mother for her wedding-day.

Or in a café,
sketching: trying to catch
the flip and sneer,
and the quick grace
Of the Paris rhetoric
around you.
Or in the Luxembourg-
a mild breeze crinkling through the tufts of buds
& your dark hair.

But seven months of separation
can turn affection to a photograph-
no flesh and blood
to it. Like the dream I had two nights ago
which I cant seem to shake:
Somehow I was hooting in my highschool stadium.
Clammy. Drizzly. Almost spring.
Beneath the hometeam goal post
six men in stovepipe hats
drew bead with dueling pistols.
But they shot blanks. Puffs of smoke
became a flock of frantic birds
scooping above me as I waded through alfalfa
somewhere in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.
My arm
(or was it yours?)
bound in a sling
flung around
the shoulder of my friend
Frank Guest.
I think I felt ecstatic. But a tractor,
chugging, muffled what I had to say to him.
Arm became
an empty
flapping sleeve.
Or ghost.
Or bird maybe.

On the way to work this morning
I walked along the Oak St. beach
a wedge of fog
obscured the traffic
& the lake. Suddenly
dead friends began to flutter at the margin of my thoughts
just like the gulls above, sweet,
invisible
but for the swoosh
of wings. That handful:

a girl named Ruth I knew in college,
the sleet-bit look about her eyes
so like this spring hard,
uncompromising in the knowledge of
how niggardly are our attempts to touch.
Or try to talk
Together,

And Frank. Now a photograph like her.
How stubbornly he would insist
the age we live in is corrupt, lacking
(as perhaps it does)
any traffic with the preternatural.
Still. His love was ingrown, too
fiercely reticent. As if,
despite the good soil his intellect was rooted in,
he secretly believed the God he got from Plato & Augustine
was ignorant and stunted as his alcoholic father.

Kit Carney, too:
lost in the multiplication of his public self
frightened by the silence in his heart.

And you, Junie. Last & most.
Sometimes I think you are the blood
circulating in my arm. But even as I write, dear,
I cannot help but wonder if
even at our best
we too don’t cultivate
that curious corruption
I sought for in the others:

the unspoken guarantee that
regardless of how firm this present love
it will become a gull abandoned in the fog.