Already afternoon, already this day backing away, rolling out of reach,
all the morning’s busyness—e-mail, phone messages,
the run along Bayview, sunlight across the road, the smell of wet earth,
snow, manure, and pine along the cow pasture; earlier, too,
those whispers, sparrows at first light,
the brusque crow of love, all the heart’s kindling.
The cats find us, the calico stretching out on top of the sofa,
the ginger-and-white asleep on the rocker. You, on a chair
across from me, reading Anam Cara and making notes,
don’t look up, say nothing I can use to turn this
into a poem. 4:20, already the light dark as blue coal.
Martin Steingesser
Published in The Sun Magazine
Copyright © 2005 The Sun
“Recently?” people ask, looking at me questioningly. “You were driving,” they say, wanting
to affirm I hadn’t been on foot.
No, I was walking, into town, in Portland, Maine, enjoying an unseasonably balmy morning and some unhurried time. The light was green at State. I looked left—no cars—and started across, toward Longfellow monument, comfortable in an amplitude of space and time that seemed to spread around me, enjoying the walk, thinking. . .
State Street is a wide thoroughfare. I looked up to the landscaped curb of the square
ahead, only several feet farther. If there were any crows in the surrounding trees whistling me warnings, I didn’t hear them. Maybe some morning sparrows fluttered nearby.
Something—not anything I can put a finger on—called attention to my left. I think the car was red and remember noting the hood sloped low toward me. Headlights, chrome bumper and grille came on in several stop frames, that is, flow time stopped, the car growing
in a sequence of stills—blowups, each bigger than the previous one. Though the frames advanced rapidly, I had time to think I might be killed. I joined hands, lifted arms overhead and threw myself shoulder first up and toward the car.
Next, I remember sitting on the pavement, car stopped before me, the driver’s door open, a woman standing there crying, “Oh, my god! Oh, my god! I didn’t see him.”
Another woman came and kneeled before me.
“Don’t move,” she said, and asked where I hurt. “Here,” I said, exploring the side of my foot above the ankle with a hand. “And my hip,” thinking then I must have come down on the hood.
“I saw you, I saw you!” a man who had rushed over and was encouraging me to lie on his coat was saying excitedly. “I saw you flying through the air!”
That’s how I almost died a sunny morning in snowy Portland, one Christmas season. But
I didn’t. I rose from the tarmac and walked to a waiting ambulance; and later, after much waiting and listening to choruses of the newly injured, I emerged from the emergency room into that same beautiful day and walked home. And, finally, this isn’t a story about one more foolish death on the road but how I saw my life, the way I would like to live it, the way it was for a moment that seemed to be without time or fear.
I have told this story five times, and then five more. And again, I want to tell it to you, because each time I am still left with the feeling I haven’t told it. What’s always missing
is that moment in which I functioned perfectly, without thinking. Try to teach me a dance step, and I am lost. If I had thought about what to do, I think I would have froze and been killed, at the least seriously injured. The car’s bumper certainly would have broken my leg. Yet I can’t remember what was happening in those moments I was saved, between when I first sensed the onrushing car and when I found myself on the pavement.
What faculty warned me? Did I close my eyes while flying through the air? I missed
a peak moment in the show and needed that bystander’s shout to learn what happened.
Isn’t it possible both to live such an experience and hold onto it? I read in the newspaper two pedestrians were killed that New Years Eve and morning. What is this world, anyway, when someone else’s bad news seems more real than getting hit yourself by a ton on wheels?
And how was time slowed, changed into the sequence of blowups I experienced, so that I was able to react within the slim moment everything took place? I have heard this phenomenon described in Zen teachings as instinctive evasion, in which there is no time lag, not a hair’s breadth, between perceiving and avoiding some danger.
I walked out of the hospital emergency room with a bruised hip into the sunny, winter afternoon, feeling the day just begun. Sunlight splashed over the sidewalk, in windows, off cars and trucks. The afternoon shook out fresh, bright sheets, the way it really is.
Martin Steingesser
First published in Maine Times
January 15, 1998
Only our breathing. I hold my love close, singing to myself, then whisper.
She makes a sleep sound. We breathe together, falling—
all of us, the planet, falling through space. This morning, I am stopping
for nothing, ear to the ground, listening for what we learn isn’t here.
Oh, so un-American, stopping for the small drum, sleet at our window,
rain in a tin cup; stopping for the sounds of metal plows, grumbling
across ice; stopping for the locust tree beside the window, its low, slow
groan, every branch sheathed in ice; stopping for each other, how we breathe,
all of us, trees, the planet, falling through space. Imagine loggers
coming to saw the tree. Think of the neighbor felling an old spruce
to plant a flagpole on his lawn. Hear the chainsaws,
hug the trunk. I won’t let go, I am stopping for nothing.
Will they return in my sleep? Why am I thinking this—what need
driving this dreaming? Worry for trees or puffing myself up? Someone
out there is whacking something. (Those some words—words for spaces
I am working to fill.) In lamplight across the street, a man
bundled in jacket, hat and gloves hacks ice on the hood of a pickup.
I can hear water in the plumbing, the clock ticking. . . I hold my love close.
We breathe together. I am stopping for nothing, listening and thinking
and singing—this morning’s soft shoe, whatever I please, holding us close.
Martin Steingesser
First published in Janus Head
Copyright © 2005 Trivium Publications, Amherst, NY
I’m not going to talk anymore, I’m going to sit here in the September
Haystack sun and play my flute and not speak, not a word.
I’ll be a sunshine man in this all blue September day, the sky
blue, the sea blue, all around blue except of course evergreens
and avocado-rind green blue spruce, saw-edged against sky blue
sea and sea blue sky. “Sweet Jesuz,” a friend says over my shoulder,
“I am old,” crooning it a way that doesn’t sound like dying but shines
just like the steptop sun silver Haystack deck, only not a word—
I’m not saying a one. I sit atop the stackhay decklong flights of stairs
above the sea, high as osprey circling this topstep Sun, improvising
my blue Indian flutesong, two flags snap-snapping in seachop wind
like the shoe rag in a black man’s hands I was jealous how he made sing,
just the way my friend who said “Sweet Jesuz” made the word old
sing like silver deckboards here in the Deer Isle morning. No, I’m not
talking anymore, I’ll be the shine man, snapping his September rag
on my yellow birch flute, Sun so bright day goes white down the long and
open, silver Haystack stairs, improvising Sweet Jesuz, sing! who be old.
Martin Steingesser
Haystack Mountain School of Crafts
30 September 2000
First published in Rattle
Copyright © 2000 Martin Steingesser
