I Walk a Wooded Path After Hearing of a Poet's Death"What is divinity if it can come
Only in silent shadows and in dreams?"
-- Wallace Stevens, "Sunday Morning"
Who sought most to puzzle out through words
what he couldn't yet know
Who taught poetry in a big city, wrote poetry
only about things outside it
Georgia's lyrical Jim Fowler who wrote of many creatures
that crawl the earth
So I walk at twilight with the scampering raccoons
hoping to see a possum
Gently lift away a palmetto frond to which a spider
has woven its web
Press a pinecone's bracts letting an angry witch
of pain pierce my thumb
Think poet's laurels, crown of thorns, find a yeoman's
polytheism in the night-sound of crickets
See the purled fabrics of Spanish moss as figures
of life's many shadows
Seek the large turkey vulture feather I've eyed
on the ground by the trail for days
Touch my forehead, think of the remembered legacies
of many great poets
Socrates said philosophers should not fear the unknown
of death
I imagine one poet's joyful yawp -- the stars offering up
their secrets -- who groused over its mystery
(In memory of David Bottoms, 1949-2023)
Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. His latest chapbook is At Home with the Dreamlike Earth (The Poetry Box, December 2023). David Bottoms was Poet Laureate of the State of Georgia from 2000 to 2012.
One thought on “Poetry from Steven Croft”
Steve, I am reading this very late at night, which doesn’t do it justice–and still–it has what has become your style, the mark of your interior “grousing” over the mysteries, as this last verse says an after-life poet might “yawp” with speechless joy over his post mortem acquaintance with some unknown universe. Did I land even close to your hint of hope, of meaning?
I have so enjoyed talking to your mother when calling your home number, the only one I have entered on my phone; she and I certainly have a bond in parent-hood of sons in jeopardy–two of mine not having made it through to a return to the living, as you may or may not know. I can’t recall if those two losses of mine–no, they both happened long after our so blissful days of meeting at Wordfinders and Artmakers.4Ever, on St. Clair Drive, which I sorely miss.
I am really glad to see this space, because I had wanted to reply most of all to your book, “New World Poems.” Looks like this space is coming to a close, so I will try email. No, it seems to offer some room. The poems in this book startle and amaze me, and do anything but calm me, so that I have get ready for the shock of stark reality that comes through as you just hint at the event I will all too soon discern from your spare language. Covid19 when I’ve long forgotten there had to be refrigerated trucks to contain the heavy surplus of dead from the dread pandemic others mocked as non-existent or a government hoax. Odd that my head spun even at your title, “Covid Spring,” and came up with my own image from that early part of a long ordeal. I really loved your voyage in that poem, and where it ended up, in such irony, saying, of the man who dared both the cutting “rough edges of disease, / the damnation of authorities” to “get out, breathe new air, to talk with a group of strangers? Why does he / believe there is no life without living?” And in a poem titled “9/12,” I am back when that catastrophe beggared television journalist’s vocabulary for weeks, when they resorted to the word horrific so many times it almost lost its meaning. And when I bought one of the newspapers the New York Times quickly shut down after its first printing, which contained dramatic photos of people in mid-descent to their deaths from the World Trade Center’s flaming towers. Was I senseless from shock when I showed that page to my little granddaughters, who were about 4 and 7? It seemed a merciful choice those people had made, I tried to tell them–it was either this or be burned to death, like the rescuing firemen who never made it up to them. All that came back, from your intense hints, powerful in their brevity and strict choices. Perhaps you can see from just these two examples, how I have to choose a time–not all at once–for perusing your so-admired and, by me, cherished poems. [BTW] I wanted to ask, in Covid Spring, what is an MMA fighter, as you said that man was? Also, I just see again that, “We Are Its Wicked Garden” is possibly the one of your two poems on Covid 19 that in seven lines lists so many of the devastations of that “microscopic wrecking ball,” of a virus, that it triggered my own item to add to your list–the refrigerated trucks coping with an unburied overload of the dead. Actually, just dealing with your poetry this way, is a refreshing return to “wordfinding” for my own self, my own most rewarding work, when I can allow it to happen in my less-strong years of life that I cling to fiercely. Your poems stun with the life and strength I find within them–long may that strength last for you–and for us awaiting your poems and your books of them. As an aside, your mom pleased me by praising the sketches I did for your first volume. But then I thought, if I ever sketched or worked out any visual art for you again it must not be on the same page as any poem. In my experience, each one of them, especially the briefest, deserves all the white space possible around them, to permit the most silence, the most stillness that these chosen utterances deserve.
Steve, I am reading this very late at night, which doesn’t do it justice–and still–it has what has become your style, the mark of your interior “grousing” over the mysteries, as this last verse says an after-life poet might “yawp” with speechless joy over his post mortem acquaintance with some unknown universe. Did I land even close to your hint of hope, of meaning?
I have so enjoyed talking to your mother when calling your home number, the only one I have entered on my phone; she and I certainly have a bond in parent-hood of sons in jeopardy–two of mine not having made it through to a return to the living, as you may or may not know. I can’t recall if those two losses of mine–no, they both happened long after our so blissful days of meeting at Wordfinders and Artmakers.4Ever, on St. Clair Drive, which I sorely miss.
I am really glad to see this space, because I had wanted to reply most of all to your book, “New World Poems.” Looks like this space is coming to a close, so I will try email. No, it seems to offer some room. The poems in this book startle and amaze me, and do anything but calm me, so that I have get ready for the shock of stark reality that comes through as you just hint at the event I will all too soon discern from your spare language. Covid19 when I’ve long forgotten there had to be refrigerated trucks to contain the heavy surplus of dead from the dread pandemic others mocked as non-existent or a government hoax. Odd that my head spun even at your title, “Covid Spring,” and came up with my own image from that early part of a long ordeal. I really loved your voyage in that poem, and where it ended up, in such irony, saying, of the man who dared both the cutting “rough edges of disease, / the damnation of authorities” to “get out, breathe new air, to talk with a group of strangers? Why does he / believe there is no life without living?” And in a poem titled “9/12,” I am back when that catastrophe beggared television journalist’s vocabulary for weeks, when they resorted to the word horrific so many times it almost lost its meaning. And when I bought one of the newspapers the New York Times quickly shut down after its first printing, which contained dramatic photos of people in mid-descent to their deaths from the World Trade Center’s flaming towers. Was I senseless from shock when I showed that page to my little granddaughters, who were about 4 and 7? It seemed a merciful choice those people had made, I tried to tell them–it was either this or be burned to death, like the rescuing firemen who never made it up to them. All that came back, from your intense hints, powerful in their brevity and strict choices. Perhaps you can see from just these two examples, how I have to choose a time–not all at once–for perusing your so-admired and, by me, cherished poems. [BTW] I wanted to ask, in Covid Spring, what is an MMA fighter, as you said that man was? Also, I just see again that, “We Are Its Wicked Garden” is possibly the one of your two poems on Covid 19 that in seven lines lists so many of the devastations of that “microscopic wrecking ball,” of a virus, that it triggered my own item to add to your list–the refrigerated trucks coping with an unburied overload of the dead. Actually, just dealing with your poetry this way, is a refreshing return to “wordfinding” for my own self, my own most rewarding work, when I can allow it to happen in my less-strong years of life that I cling to fiercely. Your poems stun with the life and strength I find within them–long may that strength last for you–and for us awaiting your poems and your books of them. As an aside, your mom pleased me by praising the sketches I did for your first volume. But then I thought, if I ever sketched or worked out any visual art for you again it must not be on the same page as any poem. In my experience, each one of them, especially the briefest, deserves all the white space possible around them, to permit the most silence, the most stillness that these chosen utterances deserve.