Author: stevekuusisto

Poet, Essayist, Blogger, Journalist, Memoirist, Disability Rights Advocate, Public Speaker, Professor, Syracuse University

Each morning I gather mosses…

Each morning I gather mosses, even in January, even when bending to customary tasks. Washing dishes, I touch the moist earth. It’s a game I play to keep alive.

**

Generally, I think human beings would be better creatures if they talked with their feet.

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Go on. Push the child you once were into the deep end. The kid will do fine.

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A memory: just before heart surgery (mine), one of the hospital interns who spoke no English tried talking to me using a translation app on his iPhone. But I couldn’t read it. I was thinking about the probability of death. And we couldn’t talk.

**

Now give me that damn candy and leave me alone!

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Trying to live well and grieving all the time. You’re one of them, those others.

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You know all those “top ten” lists. Here’s a new one—top ten dream clots:

  1. Talking to a dead mother on the phone while a dead father stands over your shoulder and tells you what to say…

  2. Buying strange bread in a foreign land with your hands tied behind your back and a gag in your mouth…

  3. Old acquaintances gathered in a gentle place, a room with soft lighting, and all the old wounds and wrongs have been forgiven. Trouble is, we were in a funeral home. And one of us, probably me, had tracked dog shit all over the fancy carpets.

  4. You’re pretending to see as you did during childhood. You’re in the softball game. Nothing you do will lead to a good outcome. But you want so desperately to fit in.

  5. A train and you’re on it. Perfect. And your uncle who was sinister in life is next to you talking about vodka.

  6. Dreaming
    Of the little girl
    Who was beside me
    In the infant hospital
    All those years ago
    Blind children
    Side by side
    Her singing

  7. Savage laughter
    You see yourself in mirrors
    Them ovoid ass bad pants
    A mannequin’s poor dream

  8. Mozart

    Improbable yes but I dreamt of him
    And though we were in a room
    Rain fell and it was beautiful
    Water coursing down the walls

    “We only get so much”
    He said—“opera is for the young”
    “String quartets, for dying”
    He was there alright

I tend to not have nightmares. My dreams are odd though. They tend to be like Elizabeth Bishop’s poem about waiting for the dentist.

1.

I recognized they weren’t living men
There was a blind man there, not me,
And he had a dog, not mine
In the cafe
With red curtains
My twin brother
Who died at birth…

Uncle History Peers Through the Bushes

Uncle History Peers Through the Bushes

All bundled up in their Stutz
Edith Wharton and Henry James
Heading out for a drive
James looks like he has hemorrhoids
Wharton appears hung over
He wonders why the brilliant
Are so grumpy—after all
Taking in facts
Is to be unconscious
Is to be nothing more
Than half awake
Is to be nothing more
Than half awake forever
He’s starting to get it right
What would Bernard Berenson think?
Berenson who said:
“A complete life may be one ending
In so full identification
With the non-self
That there is no self to die.”

Uncle History’s Desk

You have to be quick
To catch Uncle History
At his desk
It’s not really
His desk—
Think of it
As a plank
After a shipwreck
Or the whole world
Of a glowworm
Or the needle
Of Jefferson’s barometer
The tongue
Of an orphan’s shoe
The blade
Of a ceiling fan
In the abattoir
In the end
It down’s matter
What you think
Because of course
He’s been there
And gone
But there’s a chill
And a scent of roses
Yeats thought he knew
What this meant

Uncle History doesn’t notice the seasons…

Uncle History doesn’t notice the seasons
They’re all the same
It’s as if he lives inside a mountain
His eyes are like pin points
He’s a creature of the dark
Words of the scribes
Sink to his lair
His scribes, his scarabs
Tickle tickle
Here comes some more bad news
In fairness, and given
The Illud tempus
Good news can happen
But only the earth reports it
The earth with its slow hands

Auntie History and the Moon

If I could tell you I’d let you know
Says Auntie H—she loves Auden
Who was himself a kind of avatar
Of feminine tragedy
Tricked out as History
She loves it also
When he says
“The boys are whooping in up on the moon”
As in, “take that Walter Cronkite”
She thinks how they should always send
Poets and musicians into space
Keats on the moon!
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite…

Uncle History is comparatively young…

Uncle History is comparatively young
Say he’s 25,000 years old
Maybe more like 6,000
No one knows for sure
And certainly Uncle doesn’t
He’s like one of those dogs
Who turns up at a farm
Tail wagging
But he can’t tell you
Where he’s been
Sure he can talk
But its not much help
There’s a wind
With locusts
When he tries to speak
He equates weather
With sadness
Sees ice on the pond
As an illness
On a face

Uncle History Gives a Speech

Uncle History Gives a Speech

We were wrong about everything
But not about the thieves
For they were better than us
They lurked at our doorways
They snuck into our songs—
He knows when you’ve been sleeping…
We knew them from day one
Way back in Mesopotamia
They stole the very first shoes
Which were made of plant fibers
And so from the beginning
They knew how
To eat the evidence
Yes we were wrong about everything
But look as you walk the streets
At all the people
With shoes in their guts

Uncle History is sick of American smiles…

Uncle History is sick of American smiles
Those smiles perfected by the Kennedys
But which were crafted by FDR
Who had to grin his way
From paralysis to hope
“Happy Days are Here Again”
Yes, the American smile
Has a song
Yes a smile
Will make a man
Or woman
“C’mon Swamp Boy
Turn that frown upside down!”
Americans
Are like tarantulas on fire
But they’re desperate
For straighter and whiter teeth