Author: stevekuusisto

And the years come close around me
Like a crowd—spruce limbs
Wave beyond my window
I’m not myself—
I say “let it go”
Child, young man
All his mistakes
Crying alone
Tree wind helps
A cup of mushroom tea
A song my mother loved
Steep rain
Three gold apples
Hanging
From a dying tree
My friends
Who are disabled
Are struggling—
One can’t find an accessible home
Another can’t get a steady job
Though he has a doctorate
Still another can’t keep his car running
So he can teach part time.
The day is substantially dark
Who am I?
Who are we?

“I smell something in the weeds”
Sez Uncle History
“It ain’t death
But death adjacent”
Stink
Of rotting books
Or an old man’s
Hairpiece
He thinks
And patting
His pocket
He finds
He’s lost his ticket
To the underworld
He’s carried it for
A thousand years
He’s even
Touched it to his lips—
(Revenant smooch
Charon’s gift)
“Oh well” he thinks
“Whoever finds it
Will discover
The first day of death
Is the hardest”

Ah those early days beside the fire

Uncle History being read to

By his father (who wears 

A toga-like affair

And scratches himself

Since with clothing

Came bed bugs)

“Gilgamesh” 

“Enkidu and the netherworld”

Lost objects

Tears in the afterlife

Trials in this one

Heroism unrewarded

All adventures

Meaningless 

“Isn’t it lovely,”

Says his father

(Who looks like Karl Marx

In a serape)

“To think 

How you’ll

Keep track 

Of this tale

As it unfolds

Forever?”

Uncle barely remembers

As he was playing

With his Sumerian legos—

Puzzle pieces

That cast no shadows 

“Come on along,” Uncle History says
Channeling Robert Frost—
You come too…
But then he forgets his way
(Looking backwards
Will do this to you)
Crustacean travel
You might call it
And its easy to fall down
As the ancestors
Left stumbling blocks
And its easy
To forget
Where you started
Lost among the mud colored houses
At dusk
“Where did I begin?”
“Whose path is this?”
“Yes I’m talking to myself”
The self-behind me
This last minute affair
Of nostalgia
And fear
On the barren tracts
Where a forest once stood
Just outside the city

Like any mystic
Aunt History
Can be anywhere
The Levant
Mesopotamia
Peru, Pittsburgh
She knows
All the dances
The local lingos…
Of what’s unknown
Like Newton
She sees
How the brief life
Waves as darkness comes
And tiny transparent
Flying specks of faith
Fall into our hair
Its the same
Town to town
Epoch to epoch
Mazda to Mary
Worldwide
All the sad night long

When Aunt History’s sad
She feels the moon
In her ankle—the left one
A moon with silver coins
And tears, Lorca’s moon
That moon
Of a hundred
Equal faces
Each turning
Toward sorrow
Moon-bone
Moon-bone
(She skips rope
In her mind)
But she’s
Standing still
Like a girl
Calling her horse
At dusk
So still
In the heavy world

“It’s a hard road”
says Uncle History
But hardest
For the road builders
As there’s no name for them
You can look it up—
No name
Just euphemisms
“Pavement pros”
“Asphalt guys”
Even the Roman’s
Had no term for them
Though “slave” works
What does it say
That such
An important job
Has no word
Uncle
Thinks he knows
But he reckons
You can only
Get to it
Through silence
And walking in circles

Aunt History Carves a Crutch

When you’re disabled “those” others
Think they can see right through you
Your watery eyes, thin bones…
They don’t think this
Of mushrooms
Or coconuts
Or kitschy carved
Pinocchios
And of course
To a large extent
They’re not thinking at all
They’re just seeing
The aleatoric dumbbell clots
Of fussy prejudice
And you, you trembling one,
You got in their way
As they were seeing themselves
But don’t call “them”
Narcissists
For like nothing else in nature
They’re afraid of death
And again, you
You simply got in their way…
Thoughts while home alone
Knife on wood…

You can go anywhere you like
But you can’t outrun your head
Aunt History walks through a grim place
Some New Jersey marsh reclamation
Where even dinosaur bones
Can’t be found—
Just mob land corpses
And the teeth
Of railroad workers
She loves to walk
American highways
Though they have
Narrow shoulders
Death is not unlikely
But the truck
That hits her
Will roll straight through
And she’ll keep going
Like Mozart’s Papageno
Oddly cheerful
But also broken hearted
Her job is to pick things up
Carry them in her robe
Lost keys
Crumpled pages
A wind blown lock of hair
The hair of a child
A discarded flute
A single dancing shoe

Aunt History doesn’t care much
For Stravinsky
Its too much rum-ti-tum
Who needs it
Prince Ivan
And the firebird
Are piffle
She likes stories
Where no one’s saved—
At least
Not by magic
Nor by hope—
You just walk along
Maybe on a road
In summer
Somewhere in lapland
When you know
You’ve been spared
From something gruesome
There’s no analogy
For this feeling
No leitmotif
No hero