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
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
