A chickadee calls
outside my window
from the bare winter branches
of the crape myrtle.
Inside, your poems speak
to what already
I suspect.
Words sown through a lifetime,
telling us not to leave,
once what is needed
has been found.
The answers in each poem:
the wind, the seasons,
a hard and simple life.
Posted by sean on February 6, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/02/06/to-john-haines/
Straighten your papers, the ones you never look at. Never touch a paper twice, that’s what they say. Avoid information overload! Never touch a paper twice. Look at it and file it or throw it out. Don’t straighten your papers then, see if I care. Log in. Er, try to log in. Oops, forgot your password. How many are in your head. How many are the same. You fool! Don’t use the same one twice! You must use a combination of four numbers, three symbols, and no less than six letters. We will not accept anything less. Also we’ll need you to change it again as soon as you begin to remember it. Forget it the first time you try to log in. Request new password. Make up new one, but not the same as your email password. And don’t use your pet’s name. Your neighbor might hear you calling him outside and hack into your account. Throw a few papers out to make yourself feel better. It’s okay, I know you touched them already. Just throw them out so you won’t touch them again. There, isn’t that better? Now go outside and breathe in some car fumes. It might be better than recycled office air but honestly science hasn’t bothered to find out. No corporate funding would touch that kind of study. So it’s still up in the air. [Don’t laugh at that!] Walk around and pretend you’re not an insignificant speck, not just another cog in the machine (you are, even though you purport not to be by affecting a continuous broadcast of apathy and cynicism to the world, and to yourself– the worst and most damaging lies are always to yourself. We learn this over time.). Return to the office. Pick up another stack of paper from your mailbox. Leave it on your desk for weeks to gather the appropriate office patina. Then recycle it. Or think you’re recycling it. Everyone knows the cleaning staff just throws it all in the trash anyway. It’s common knowledge. It doesn’t matter. Recycling can’t save us, Derrick Jensen says. Only complete destruction of civilization will save us. Would you prefer that? Read The Road by Cormac McCarthy and check back with me. I’ll make tea and we can pontificate. Then we’ll pack our emergency preparedness kits. Leave work behind now. Go home and attend to the needs there, the ones behind the scenes of everyone’s public life. Nourish your body. Attempt to nourish your mind but mostly just numb it and then maybe squeeze in a little bit of nourishment before sleep. If you’re lucky when you’re out late walking you’ll look up and see Venus glowing above the rooftops. Or maybe a full moon. If you’re lucky a breeze will rustle the cottonwood leaves and leave you breathless. But you won’t be lucky tonight because it’s winter and the branches are bare. So go to sleep and dream of spring. Dream about the end of civilization. Dream of anything at all. Like Amy Hempel says, that’s where most of us get what we want.
Posted by sean on January 26, 2012
https://sd-stewart.com/2012/01/26/recycling-with-the-mayans/
It was the way the trees spread out like outraged arms toward the sky. The grey in your eyes and everywhere else we looked. A dog barked and the mail slot clanged. Home again where visiting hours have begun. They never end and you never leave. Walking the streets late at night brings that yearning, the restless implants below your skin, bumping up at inconvenient times. The other ones make slow improvements when what you need is the now, your chest swelling with cold air, salty tears torn from your eyes, the pine needles to deliver something worth breathing in. No one asks for any of this. The cold flow of unattended life, the blank faces, the purchases and receipts.
It was the way rain fell across your face, eyes wide and shining. The cracked and swollen sidewalks, the screeching of your bicycle’s brakes. A leaking roof, a broken dryer, the things that need fixing when so much else is broken. We learn to survive through failure, leaving wreckage in our wake. We forge ahead out of desperation, armed with scraps of what we think worked before. Will the sky ever clear, or will the roof cave in on our heads. Does it even matter.
It can be the rubbing away of a greasy brand. The slipping off downstream. Evolution of the day-to-day, a smoothing out. The cracks, the breaks, the swells, the leaks, all of it stuffed in a burlap sack. Hurl it from the roof and watch it sink heavy in the rain. Watch it loosen the knot across your chest. This fraying will be our salvation, it will be our last rite.
Posted by sean on December 14, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/12/14/corner-seat-upstairs/
The tissue holding these moments together, feather-thin as it is, expands and pulls taut as a hesitant breeze carries the fleetest scent of fall for us to breathe in. Moods collide, launch forth into open air, crash empty to the unforgiving ground. Days drip one into the next, weeks gel together, and still we stand here bare and afraid. What is it going to take for us to be satisfied? When we will we stop our restless twitching? This is life, by god, and it is only here to be lived. There is nothing to figure out; all the mysteries we concoct are simply ghosts dancing on the head of a pin, taunting us even as they fade away. The windows we keep in our minds looking out onto future lives are glazed with thick smears of colorless idealism; the pictures of us that we see projected there are shiny distortions, marionettes we yank into desperate action after so many failed attempts to live wholly here and now. We convince ourselves that our daily lives constitute a dead existence, held fast by debt and fear of impoverished old age. But in truth we squander our time here, fretting and wishing instead of living. And it seems like such a simple thing, to merely live, to stay in a moment for its duration, filling ourselves with its wonder. Yet so many of us fail in this one endeavor we all can claim as our purpose. We only have a finite amount of these moments and each passing day drains thousands more of them into the black hole of mortality. The least we can do is spend our allowance before it disappears.
Posted by sean on August 20, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/08/20/spend-it-as-you-get-it/
Beneath the crust lies a kernel. A kernel formed of decisions made and those deferred. Crack it open and free the seed inside to float away. Follow it. Down a deer trail. Under a rock. Into the reeds. Up in the air, over the ridge. Pay attention. Ignore the ghostly hands pulling at your collar, suggestive in manner, dragging you, enticing you toward a warm spot to curl up and stop. It’s always the decisions. Counseling for or against. Talking, hashing it out, pacing in deranged circles. Stop the pacing. Wrangle your thoughts and subdue them. Step back. Breathe. There is a lightness in us that we can reach. Tap it like a sugar maple and let it flow, sweet and pure. Drink it in and never stop. What will matter in the end is how we spent our days; these moments won’t return.
Posted by sean on June 7, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/06/07/lightness/
In another place, for once. These walls blue instead of yellow, yet the likeness remains. A window from which to gaze, at treetops, at sky and clouds. What we endure like some concrete mix plastered to our outsides, layering on another wall between what we feel and what we show to the others. The talking we do, so careful, so orchestrated, a hackneyed script whittled down to nothing. But today is not a mere trailing on of yesterday. No, today is a rope tossed back to us, its intricate knotted fibers there for fingers to grasp and pull us forward to lighter times, when we are who we are and we do what we are here to do.
Posted by sean on January 14, 2011
https://sd-stewart.com/2011/01/14/from-a-room-with-slanted-ceilings/
Peer through the doorway to see the yellow light fall across the bed, cat curled up within the warmth of its rays. Recharging on solitude, or maybe just reverting back to it. Unfamiliar pangs of hunger appear after two days of illness. Mind is a mess of directionless chatter. Soon there will be work again, a sinking back down into the morass.
Daydream of the cloistered life: a seat in front of this window, a view onto this rooftop tableau. The players: a mockingbird and a pair of cardinals. The drama focuses on a small pool of water at the roof’s edge. Herky-jerky movements like puppets as each actor attempts to take a drink. Have you ever watched a mockingbird tip its head back and swallow? It is truly a sight to behold. A couple of juncos show up as stand-ins, filling out the stage with their sprightly steps.
My attention in life ever shrinking to smaller details, my eyes wandering farther the larger the concepts grow, my ability to feign interest sinking like an anchor into cold black water. The rooftops, the treetops, they catch and hold me, leave me breathless. A new shoot poking out from an aloe’s center stuns me. And always the music to sink into at times like this, a warm aural bath that clears the mind and calms the nerves. It doesn’t ask, only gives, already knowing how you need to feel.
Posted by sean on December 30, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/12/30/the-wind-empties-your-eyes/
“We are living in the dark ages”–NMN
The crows are gathering…
Life is in the interstices.
In the moments after what happens is where we find ourselves.
It’s all we’ve got left. It’s all we ever really had to work with.
Not answers to find, per se, but maybe a subtle understanding.
Maybe some rocky, unsettled…peace.
Posted by sean on October 28, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/10/28/indivisible/
Small tragedies and minor victories twist around your idle fingers like woody vines. You trade witticisms like barbed wire slipped underneath your tongue. A single scent scatters a part of the brain already always a bit on edge. But at arm’s length, you don’t ever find the visceral. You won’t ever find it there. So push away the veil of ions, then, and you will see the rush of blood. Warm air on skin, brushing off a touch that never came. Color in cheeks, déjà vu and try to ignore imagination prone to wanton escapades. Think and wish, then, and think again. Fall into the ordinary, fall into it open and true, with wild grit in your gut.
Posted by sean on September 3, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/09/03/see-you-when-your-troubles-get-like-mine/
When sleep still clouds your eyes, and the day has not yet dawned upon you. When dreams still stuff your head from ear to ear, and sleep still lies in reach. When there’s still a chance the day belongs to you. When you haven’t yet sat down for hours and when your mouth can form words and electricity showers the air with invisible sparks. There is a single moment, plucked from so many others, where you feel it, that which you grew up without but saw in others instead, from afar. Then later, sifting through a pile of the day’s written words, stacked up in your electronic woodlot, a certain desperation grows again. Even later still, the banjo duels with the fiddle across the orange light seeping into the wooden floorboards. The country in the city, within these four walls, shut up in the stale air, but breathing life. The night’s sleepy eyes begin to shut, and in between each drowsy blink, I think of you and you and everyone.
Posted by sean on August 27, 2010
https://sd-stewart.com/2010/08/27/in-the-morning-or-the-late-afternoon-or-in-the-midnight-hour/
s. d. stewart 