Stuart Kestenbaum

Mourner’s Kaddish

“I’ll see you in the sky above, in the tall grass and the ones I love”

Bob Dylan from You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go

I still can’t watch the film of the two jets hitting the towers. I’ll

close my eyes before the billowing black smoke appears, not wanting to see

the collapse of the building where my brother died 103 stories above you

and the rest of the world. After the smoke cleared, no clouds in

the heavens, just the blue. It stayed that way for weeks the

air crisp with the melancholy of autumn, sorrow in the sky.

Sorrow and silence, no answers arriving from up above.

I used to think each loss was a distant planet, but loss is in

every breath we take, and no one leaves this world without the

stunning reality of no tomorrow. We measure how tall

our children grow, making marks on the door jamb, we watch the grass

greening in the spring. There are miracles everywhere and

if you live long enough, you can see they are made of the

heart’s fullness and emptiness, how the two become one.

See? We go on living. We go on living. Tomorrow may I

learn to comprehend the wisdom of such love.

Car Wash

“Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift.”

Bob Dylan from Subterranean Homesick Blues

When I worked in my father’s gas station, I wasn’t even twenty.

I’d dry the Buicks and Fords that came out of the wash, years

before I began to think about jobs, and what I might make of

myself, whatever that might mean, because even after all that schooling

you rarely know where you’re going, but you have a degree and

a car with a full tank of gas. I wanted drive back roads before they

vanished. I wanted to find someplace deeper and put

my heart to work, write a poem that would change both me and you

but those moments are rare, as rare as the tips I’d get drying cars on

summer days, the boss’s son, an old bath towel draped over my arm the

picky customers expecting that a clean old car would be like a new day

of the spirit, where you just need to start the engine and shift.

---

Stuart Kestenbaum is the author of six collections of poems, Pilgrimage (Coyote Love Press), House of Thanksgiving (Deerbrook Editions), Prayers and Run-on Sentences (Deerbrook Editions) Only Now (Deerbrook Editions), How to Start Over (Deerbrook Editions), and Things Seemed to Be Breaking (Deerbrook Editions). He has also written The View from Here (Brynmorgen Press), a book of brief essays on craft and community.

He has written and spoken widely on craft making and creativity, and his poems and writing have appeared in small press publications and magazines including Tikkun, the Sun, the Beloit Poetry Journal, and the New York Times Magazine. He served as Maine’s poet laureate from 2016-2021 and hosted Poems from Here on Maine Public Radio/Maine Public Classical and was the host/creator of the podcasts Make/Time and Voices of the Future.

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headlines w/Stuart Kestenbaum

Being Ready

Tell people that you’re a poet and you can get a wide range of responses. To some, poetry died somewhere in the 19th century or in high school, and they’re fascinated that they’ve just met a contemporary practitioner. To others, it can be secular salvation, the exact words they needed to hear in a time of crisis. Most people are in between these two poles.

Sometimes, when I’m asked what I do, and after I answer that I’m a writer, there’s a pause with the follow up question, ‘what do you write?’ After I answer ‘poetry’, I’m often asked ‘when did you write your first poem?’ I don’t think that surgeons get asked ‘when did you perform your first operation’ or investment managers get asked ‘when did you buy your first stock’, but I find this is a common question for me as poet.

It could be that it’s just a fill-the-space-in-a-conversation question, or it could be that the questioner is linking poetry with inspiration, that poets can be so taken with a moment in space and time, that they must record it and make sense of it. I understand that impulse, because for many years I thought I had to wait for those moments to make a poem. The stars align, the sun’s rays break through the clouds.

Somewhere in my journey, I realized that inspiration is always simmering on the backburner. It’s our awareness that lets us know what’s already cooking on the stove. Earlier this year I taught a one-day workshop for the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance in Portland and I stayed overnight the day before. To clear my mind the next morning, I decided to walk instead of drive.

Teaching writing is not the same as writing, but for me in order to be a teacher I have to be a poet too. I left the house in a poetry frame of mind, walking in a neighborhood that I had lived in years before. The details of my walk began to pile up: the man behind the counter at Dunkin’ Donuts working fast in the early morning, one customer after another. A baby sparrow just learning to fly, skidding under a parked car. The funeral chapel where I saw my mother’s body before her burial. Chicory, the flower that thrives in vacant lots, blossoming near the curb. A man walking down the street eating a muffin. The cool air of morning. An emotion that couldn’t be named. I held these in my mind and felt them making meaning in their juxtaposition.

Stuart Kestenbaum

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on The Book of John by Lindsey Royce, A review by Jody Stewart

IT ALL STARTED WITH HAPPY THE WOLF

It all started with Happy the Wolf, the beloved family-dog of the poets Pam Uschuk and William Pitt Root. About 14 years ago I was urged to join Facebook by the wonderful Jack Estes, then publisher of Pleasant Boat Studio, that I might “promote” my upcoming book. There was this striking white dog, his veterinary crisis, and ‘his poets’ who became, in that weird magic-wand way, “friends.” These poets, and maybe Happy too, selected Lindsey Royce’s Play Me A Revolution as a winner of the Silver Concho Prize to be published by Press 53 in 2019. I bought the book, which had an energy and vibrancy I liked a lot, and thus connected with a new “friend.” Lindsey is a lively presence on Facebook and when her husband John became horribly ill with stomach cancer she was, I think, shored up by sharing his difficulties, her daily caregiving chores, the ups and downs, her hope, the soon frailer hope, and then that fading of one last hope. John --in his terrible pain, his rallies, his humor within the bitter unfairness of cancer-- somehow came alive for us “friends.” We outsiders, from various distances, cared about both Lindsey and her beloved husband. We cheered them on, kept the faith, and we stayed to honor a wrenching farewell. That last Christmas we saw John in bed, his brightened face surrounded by cards and gifts from faraway “friends.” For me, that’s a precious memory. I -- with others -- was given the gift of witness and a true use for hopes and prayers.

There’s something stronger than death, and that’s the

presence of those absent in the memory of the living.

from Valerie Perrin’s Fresh Water for Flowers

John Kevin Bouldin: veteran, husband, chef, animal lover, fly-fisherman, man at home in the wilderness —was a person cherished altogether: someone unmet I‘ll not forget. We should all love as much as he was loved.

The poems in The Book of John are passionate, devastating, lush with pain; in sorrow there is much life, and from anger unexpected tenderness. The opening poem ‘Portrait in Half-Light’ lifts its face, declaring

My husband could be anyone

in this half-light. I pay gentle attention

to massaging his toes, the balls of his feet,

and his arches, the only body

parts that cancer hasn’t slit

like the guts of a fish.

I am not granted the luxury of turning back….

The poet has introduced herself and her beloved; she is making things clear. Speaking of ‘the beginning of your end,’ she says ‘under the blanket we lay dying.’ Royce does not pretend to separate “speaker” and “poet;” I find this refreshing; as a reader I don’t have to fuss if I am getting it right. What’s delivered is the dedicated tending, this hard work of mourning through language which gives passion, fear, anger and bitter sadness shape through this poet’s mutable, though singular, voice. As hope wanes Royce wonders “ Do I walk away/or toward…?” Who is this being she so loves and who loves her? What have they shaped – the structure of their love-- does it survive? At one point the poet says “He no more belongs to me/than snowfall…” (a line I love.) making a figure for spiritual “non-attachment” that may later endure and comfort. From the title poem, which berates and pleads with God, Royce puts her foot down:

Because my testimony will be direct

as an aspergil’s aim, because I am wife

and waterer of forget-me-nots, because

fanatically, I halo my love

while you God,

end him.

Wherever my dead husband John is,

I demand you nurture him.

This poem reads more vividly and musically than just these few lines; I find it sobering, passionate and beautifully wrought. It’s full of a difficult grace yet confronts a “vile injustice.” The Book of John swells with the life of what’s lost; their hikes, and favorite foods, their joking about who gets the last best cookie, dogs, music, drinks shared with friends, all the vibrancy and depth of desire as well as remembering John’s years in the military. It’s touching that Lindsey Royce individually addresses each of John’s elderly parents. This book is so felt with its emotionally propulsive lines; the poems, full of credible, passionate intensity and grace touch on far more than I can describe to you here.

Everything about our house, old and new,

speaks of you, and the panoramic country

we made our home: …

our dirt drive lined

with those cottonwoods which make me sneeze.

I’m still moving through tunnels

and underpasses, reverberating our song.

from ‘Everything About Our House’

I hope I would have found The Book of John without Happy the Wolf but I am ever grateful to him. For a number of my friends, this is the season of widowhood and while I haven’t yet felt such a grief this book brings me closer to recognizing its agonizing power. For anyone currently grieving, this book may be too raw. For you who are friends and helpers of those who grieve, the rage, pain, and celebration of this book-- about a man named John --may break something open for you as it did for me. And oh, for any reader these poems touch the deepest of life-wishes: love, acceptance, endurance.

--Jody Stewart

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