The Difference We Make
September 2013

Empty air was hissing
as from a gold string fob sifted on marble.
Some things take another thing
to make sense for them.

When I reached down to pick it up, the name
chestnut echoed as a keepsake to imagine
luck for my pocket, carried with change.

We gathered at Memorial Church to listen
to readings of your poems. None of them
were set in churches, allowing you this further
chance to resist yet also embellish
a welcoming exile and attempt to naturalize you.

One of the professors related your meditation
on the pastor’s beret, your insight into the thing’s
aerodynamic shape and lightness, holding it
like a frisbee between thumb and finger,
mind’s-eyeing it flung into the congregation.

The poet’s vision could perform the necessary
desanctification of the sacred, to share
grace for our laughter, which the pastor
for heaven’s sake might thank the poet for.

With vaults to echo the skies, the altar for
your or my supper table and by metonymy of use
the fruits of the earth, the earth itself,
a church makes a kind of poem of the world—
with acoustics especially for song
and speech, middle-earth in its edification
of a mind waking to meaning, to prayer, or to a poem
to articulate our wonder, to advocate for us,
for our reconciliation, to forge the soul
or, say, shape us, to belong, in the difference we make.

For something slightly unusual we guessed
our way down Brattle to the garden at Longfellow’s.
Starlings and a crow pecked in the grass.



A russet squirrel gnawing an acorn motioned
for us to follow the path along the beds
with labels for end of summer’s crestfallen roses—

onto a trellised vine. Wanting thoughts looked.
Were those real, clustered in perfect cone-shapes?
They couldn’t—could they be ripe? It would be wrong

to lift a handful—as my hand reached for the grapes
to roll and crush their tartness on my tongue
thinking this appropriate for a trade

poet’s memory, a frisson’s object
to flesh out the reed music Seamus Heaney made
with prudence and propriety to contradict.

Michael Todd Steffen is the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award. His poems have appeared in journals including The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, The Dark Horse, and The Poetry Porch.

Of his second book, On Earth As It Is, now available from Cervena Barva Press, Joan Houlihan has noted Steffen’s intimate portraits, sense of history, surprising wit and the play of dark and light…the striking combination of the everyday and the transcendent.