Whirling leaf-like from the dunes
and marshes near the southern shore
of Lake Michigan, north of the Ohio,
east of the Windy City, west of South Bend—
my tongue grew centered in silence,
my ear a blind stone.
But now words skittering in me
must go somewhere: they might
dance on stones, or sink
after skipping on water.
I don’t know. I can’t care.
I haven’t the slightest idea
where this is going yet but I know
if we start
together with a season we can’t get lost.
So say summer. Summer, I say,
a time when time
drags its warm belly on rocks
caught in the sun. And four-o’clock
blossoms spill the creek banks blue.
By looking, I see
James Wright rarely started a sentence
in mid-line, but I do it
frequently, a cheap trick. In time I learned
to reach out of myself
for love alone,
sincerely. When I walk now in spring
on a cracked sidewalk in town with birds
filling the air and the buds
on trees at the edge of bloom
I find it
easy to move
lightly.
Arthur Stewart, now retired, was an aquatic ecologist, group leader, senior scientist, and science leader at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. In addition to numerous technical publications in ecology and ecotoxicology journals, his science-inspired poems and essays have been widely published in both literary and scientific journals. He was inducted into the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame for poetry in 2013.
Click the images below to find Arthur Stewart’s books.
*Featured image credit: Vitaly Otinov, Unsplash