[The day was like a forest of stone…]

Stephen Kuuisto

The day was like a forest of stone with stringent balladsSome sang the songs   some did notMost tried to navigate between lithic treesI have been in more than one ossuary on my travelsSkulls lined up like nouns for schoolchildrenDon’t look at me ironically with your postmodern peepersThe falling we will do ere long will be without endNight and far to goWishful songs   some from boyhoodThe one about the fish and the old manThe one about rowing and night and far to goThe uproar of living by day and dreaming by nightYour teeth wear outThe brass buttons on Father’s uniform glitter up in the atticAnd night and far to goHave I ever told you   my dear   that a succession ofImmense birds guides all my thinking?

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Color photograph of poet Stephen Kuusisto, and his companion animal, a cream labrador
Photo:
Connie Kuusisto

Stephen Kuusisto directs The Burton Blatt Institute’s interdisciplinary programs in disability at Syracuse University where he holds a University Professorship. He is the author of the memoirs Planet of the Blind (a New York Times “Notable Book of the Year”) and Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening, and of the poetry collections Only Bread, Only Light, and Letters to Borges. His newest memoir, Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey was published by Simon & Schuster. A graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a Fulbright Scholar, he has taught at the University of Iowa, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, and The Ohio State University. Kuusisto has served as an advisor to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and to the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, DC. He has appeared on numerous television and radio programs including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Dateline, All Things Considered, Morning Edition, Talk of the Nation, and Animal Planet. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Harper’s, and The Reader’s Digest. His daily blog, Planet of the Blind, is read globally by people interested in disability and contemporary culture. He is a frequent speaker in the U.S. and abroad.

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Close Escapes
Copper Canyon Press
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“Never ‘in’ time,” Stephen Kuusisto’s third poetry collection, Close Escapes, moves through a river of memory. In one poem, Kuusisto is “the blind kid again,” pressing his finger to a cornered spider. In another, he walks down a harbor in Helsinki, “still twenty-three among the Baltic gulls.” Adrift in time and place—Tallinn, New York, a Velamo monastery—our anchor is the poet, navigating a sightless world with intelligence and dark humor. As Kuusisto moves forward through meditations on beauty, “dark joy,” loss, aging, and the afterlife, he also reaches back, talking to writers, musicians, and thinkers of the past—Orwell, Marvin Bell, Salvatore Quasimodo. In one scene, Kuusisto ponders death, asking Bach to “Tell [him] of the galant flourishes / As we leave this life.” Readers, alongside Kuusisto, are left reaching for that “frail wisdom,” for an answer to the question of our earthly existence. We find tenderness in our human connections, both lasting and fleeting, sometimes gone. We drift onward, learning to find “music in human silence.”

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