Tom Keith passed away unexpectedly this past Sunday, and in honor of his sundry contributions to Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion and to radio and to theater and to comedy and to improvisation and to the general goodness of the world, I dedicate this pastoral elegy:
Pastoral elegy for Tom Keith
IN as much time as take sheep to learn letters
A shepherd will rehearse a whole volume of sound effects
No one will have to read any words on a page
Just close her eyes and hear wrestling with alligators
Or hen-pecked hermaphrodites shopping with skaters
Alongside constructors of volcanoes with craters
And this shepherd will not know what aspect of effort
Will touch fellow shepherds in Land-o-Lakes backwoods
Till he reaches the confines of a tree-sowing Heaven
And rains down upon all as loon echoes in desert
Oh, to the joy Mr. Keith now embodies
As he emits sounds for turkeys out of mouths of iguanas
As he tricks kin with fog horns that smack of horned fauna
And cries for “can’t make me” in place of “I wanna
Yes, to the luck Mr. Keith shall bestow
Unto sheep and their shepherds, all gleefully in tow
Who will wonder if crickets are remote control boats
The sounds that they’ll hear will be real and part fancy
And exist between chance and omnipresent Keith strategy
And the love we’ll all know (yes, it’s born of part snow!)
Will reside between rural and urbane radio
And transcend all the bounds made purely for show
Moving upward past mountains and star gazers’ know
Toward a locale so idealized it’s not clearly there
Inside chambers of Tom Keith in apt rafters over ear
Outside logic and sound check and n’er-roaming dear
Thank you, Tom Keith, for your tongue and your cheek
May you improvise in death, resting always in pique
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