Life Near the Time Horizon of a Black Hole: Collection of Poems

Publisher Note

“What is best in music is not to be found in the notes.” — Gustav Mahler

MindConsiliums is pleased to present Howard F. Stein’s “Life Near the Time Horizon of a Black Hole,” a collection that practices consilience, the ability to jump, almost flawlessly, from one discipline to another until separate languages begin to speak together. Cosmology, psychology, anthropology, and ethical reflection exchange vocabulary without losing contact with the reader’s lived body.

Stein’s poems, and the backstories that accompany them, function as meditations on life under altered gravity. Near an event horizon, time distorts and a field narrows. In human terms, this is how hypervigilance and grief can feel, attention pulled toward a single point, the nervous system bracing against what cannot be negotiated. Stein describes himself, in more than one place, as bearing witness, and that stance matters. The work refuses both spectacle and denial. It looks directly, then stays.

Yet these pages do not project doom. They carry a quiet hope, not as reassurance, but as a possibility of restoration: the return of coherence, the reappearance of choice, the small signals of safety that let a mind widen again. The poems make room for dignity and responsibility without demanding mastery.

This is also the opposite of murder-by-tradition. Stein does not repeat inherited forms until they go dead. He listens for the living impulse inside them, then restores it, line by line, image by image, often with a musician’s ear.

Music, throughout, is not ornament. It is another language to acquire, a parallel way of knowing that can hold meaning when ordinary speech fails. That gift, offered without coercion, is part of what makes this collection durable company at the edge.

— Inna Rozentsvit

Author’s Introduction

The poems I have selected for this essay all orbit around an admittedly bizarre-sounding theme: what it is like to live near the time horizon of a black hole. To a poet’s — or artist of any genre — imagination, anything or anyone is available to become metaphor or simile.

Let me first say a few words about actual physical black holes, that often are found at the center of spiral galaxies. In space, a black hole is an exploded dead star so massive that the intensity of its gravitational pull is greater than the speed of light. Light can never escape it. The first black hole, discovered in 1964, is called Cygnus X-1. The term itself was coined in 1968 by physicist John Wheeler. In 1783 in England, John Mitchell first formulated the idea of a mass whose gravity was greater than the speed of light, which then could not escape. The object could therefore emit no light and would be invisible.

Ever since their discovery by astronomers and astrophysicists, black holes have been appropriated as a springboard for dramatic, often horrific, images and stories, often in science fiction. Soon, many senior poets and poetry journal editors became so inundated by black hole lore that they closed the floodgates on the surfeit. They strongly urged poets to avoid the subject and not submit poems or science fictionalized images.

Decades ago, accomplished poets and editors advised me never to write poems about roses, sunsets, longing for spring, lost love, and many others, because they had become virtually exhausted if not “owned” by the great poets. Therefore, any later effort would be futile, fall utterly short, and would only be a sign of hubris. At worst, they would be tiresome cliches.

So here I now come with an entire article, filled with poetry, and am emboldened in its very title to evoke fantasies and emotions conjured by black holes and the time-horizons or event-horizons beyond which there is no return. Black holes are doomed to darkness. Many scientists have long bristled at the “poetic license” artists of all genres have taken liberty with their empirically Solid Ground.

Yet even the notion of Solid Ground might be a cherished illusion. Theorists of general and special relativity, and the many species of quantum mechanics, have long questioned absolute solidity and It-ness of mass. For many, even particle dissolves into waves. Alfred North Whitehead, the great philosopher, over a century ago, argued for the ultimate primacy of symbol and metaphor. Throughout the history of science, one day’s Immutable Reality becomes either the next day’s fiction or a part-theory of a larger, more encompassing one.

It is not that the pursuit of truth is futile and misguided, but that truth is more liquid than solid. In such a world, poetry is not necessarily only and always the projection of The Individual Unconscious. Poetry can be the result of a long, intimate intersubjective dialogue with The Other and Otherness. Poetry – all art – is not necessarily a flight from the elusive Reality that science studies. It can be a partner in the pursuit of understanding inner and outer and in-between worlds.

Poetry can be another way, another approach, to studying and making sense (including emotional sense) of Reality. Poetry can both complement science, and in its own way, be a form of science. Long ago, in 1821, in his essay, “A Defense of Poetry,” the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley spoke of poetry as the “centre and circumference of knowledge” — not some outlier at the periphery, or a tangent, or epiphenomenon.

Poetry can help science, and scientists, become more scientific, attuned as poets are to a different kind of empiricism from ways of studying dark matter, photons, and an expanding universe. Poetry is yet another way of knowing. Imagine thinking of writing poetry as a form of research! To the world of consilliums, the idea might not be farfetched. Perhaps poetry could become part of the unity (unification, verb) of knowledge, as Edward O. Wilson envisaged in his 1998 book Consilience.

Somewhere in a poem or two, I have written that humankind, and all Nature, dwells on the edge of a cliff from which precipice there is only endless falling. That image of danger and vulnerability is one plausible metaphor for the precariousness we humans have created for ourselves and for the entire planet. Perhaps it is not unimaginably far from this metaphor to a parallel one: that of living precariously close to the time- or event-boundary beyond when all disappears irretrievably into the black hole.

And now, my patient reader, can you perform an experiment with me? As you read the individual poems that follow, and my attempt to link them into a story arc, can you allow one part of your attentiveness be to experiencing yourself physically nearing the space-time event geography, beyond which all that you are and hold dear forever disappears, annihilated, lost?

Can you allow yourself, through this narrative and through the poems, to experience what it might be like to lose an entire earth? Perhaps if you can, with your entire psychoneurosomatic being, then you can realize how precious our blue pearl of the heavens is, and find some way to help pull it back from the finality of the time horizon?

I would like to discuss with you — as if you are here, present with me, in conversation — the matter of the tone, the atmosphere, the darkness, the bleakness that many people have said to me over the years characterizes much of my poetry. Questions, misgivings, often go something like this: “Howard, so much of your poetry is depressing. Is the world really so irredeemably bleak, dark? Are we trapped in a miasma of unbreathable air, suffocating from our own self-poisoning? Is there nothing good to be found? No joy? No way out? How can you take away all hope? What does this kind of poetry offer?”

My hesitant, reluctant answer is that poets are obligated to tell the truth, perhaps imperfect truth, but as close to possible what the inner, the outer, and the in-between world is. Odd to say that Poetry serves the Reality principle, not the kind of Pleasure principle (a distinction first made by Freud) that is ultimately self-blinding and self-destructive. Back in 1902, journalist Finley Peter Dunn, wrote that the role of journalism is to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.” I have heard and read many poets say the same thing, unaware perhaps of its origin.

Poetry is often astringent, draws attention to That Which Is, not to what we might wish it to be. One major role of poetry is to bear witness — there is even a genre of poetry-of-witness. Often implicitly, it is a voice of protest, of social criticism, directly or indirectly. It is grounded in ethics, not supposed neutrality or aloofness (above the battle). Consider the poetry of Wilfred Owen, a British soldier in World War I; or William Butler Yeats’ poem, “The Second Coming,” written in 1919, in the shadow of World War I.

Certainly, they do not make the reader or listener “feel good,” as in happy, “uplifting,” even oblivious. I think it is part of a poet’s responsibility to help listen and reader alike to Feel the Real, not to mask or sugar-coat it. Much of my poetry here, written from lived experience frighteningly close to the gravitational pull of the black hole, helps me to feel honest, truthful, a bearing witness to what I cannot turn away from. Yes, it is painful for me to look it in the face — but, at least for me, even more painful, in the sense of guilt, shame, refusal of responsibility, to look toward something or someone more pleasant. In short, to help me not to feel deeply. We all are tempted to succumb to a self-protective armor: “What don’t I want to feel?”

In American English, there is the slogan of “hoping/looking for light at the end of the (dark) tunnel.” I do not disparage or reject the yearning to find one’s way out of the frightening, confusing darkness.” Many of the poems in this book are about learning to see in the dark, without a candle or flashlight, and to learn from that unwelcome experience. To become familiar with the darkness on its own terms is another way to put it.

To Freud, darkness characterized the realm of the unconscious. The unconscious was a “dark continent” to be entered into and explored. One form it takes, for example, is the uncanny, an eerie experience that something or someone is both familiar and hidden. The light of reason would make sense of the unconscious’ many disguises through the various defenses. To stay in, not flee from, the darkness, is central to the work of clinical psychoanalysis and to the work of psychohistorians. Both labor close to the time horizon of their respective black holes.

Before turning — finally! — to the poems themselves, let me try to convey these same ideas in a realm closest to my heart: music. Imagine with me, if what I have just written, and the poems to follow, could “speak” in the “language” of their sound world of music, what do I imagine they might sound like? To the living universe inside my ears, these conjure what it is like to live in the space-time zone immediately above the voracious “mouth” of the black hole, the point of no return, psychotic world destruction. J. S. Bach: St. Matthew Passion; Beethoven: the final three piano sonatas; String Quartet in C-sharp minor (Op. 131); Grosse Fuge; Missa solemnis; Schubert: String Quartet in D minor (D. 810), “Death and the Maiden”; the song cycle Winterreise; Wagner: Parsifal; Bruckner: Symphony No. 9; Verdi: Requiem; Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde, Symphonies Nos. 9 and 10; Sibelius: Symphony No. 4, Tapiola; Tchaikovsky: the Manfred Symphony; Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 8, 13, 14, and 15, and the fifteen string quartets; Roy Harris: Symphony No. 3; Benjamin Britten: the opera Peter Grimes, War Requiem.

From this list, consider one composer often associated with the dark, bleak side of life: the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich, who lived under constant scrutiny and threat by Soviet leader Josef Stalin and his oppressive enforcers. For decades, he feared for his life from a terrorizing regime. Yet he was adulated by millions of Russians precisely because, in his symphonies and chamber music, he told the emotional truth of the frightening darkness under which most people lived. True, Shostakovich was gifted with the ability to disguise his implicit cultural exposure, but his audiences were grateful for the honesty with which he portrayed what it felt like to live under Stalin’s overbearing oppression.

I have offered this list of composers and compositions, both to convey an imaginary double helix between words and music, and to invite my reader to come up with your own genre and pieces of music, or if not music, visual art, drama, etc.

I think that the poems that follow have in common my refusal to pretend I and we do not live near the time horizon of a black hole. To be willing to become familiar with darkness is no rebuke to light. In his 1943 play, The Flies, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote that “Human life begins on the far side of despair” (Act 3, Scene 2). Perhaps bearing witness to darkness is itself a form of light, a refusal to turn away, or to run away. Survival in the face of the Death Star is a form of resistance.

We defy the gravity of the Death Star by refusing to draw too near to its gravitational pull, yet staying near enough to study it, explore it, describe it, feel it, make sense of it, evoke it. We defy darkness by naming it. Poetry and other forms of artistic creativity can help us to do this.

I now, finally, turn to the poems themselves, some desolate, despondent, others, a reprieve from the oppression, a momentary sanctuary before I return to hovering over the abyss.

List of the poems:

1. Who Will Write a Requiem for the Earth?
2. Bird Feeder in Winter
3. The Blake Place
4. War Horses
5. The Haunted Hayfield
6. Hurt
7. Short on Staff, or You’d Better Listen
8. Imperfect Leaf
9. Fullness of Fall
10. Lunchtime, or Nobody’s Home
11. Tapiola
12. Earth, from Orbiting Satellite
13. Reverie at Lake Overholser

1.
Who Will Write a Requiem for the Earth? 

Dedicated to the International Psychohistorical Association Convention, May 18-20, 2023.

Who will write a Requiem
For our Earth, third planet out
From an Unremarkable star?
What are Seigfried’s betrayal
And the fall of Valhalla,*
To a doomed planet,
From which no
Dead could arise?
No Rhine will again**
Overflow its banks
To renew the world.
Gregor Samsa will for once
Be glad he turned
From human into cockroach.***
What will Gregor’s relatives
Record as the death scene
Just after the final curtain,
When singers and conductors,
Chorus and full orchestra,
Have taken one last bow,
And the opera house
Disappears into
Irredeemable night

None will be left
To write a lament —
No requiem for
The Forgotten earth

*Götterdämmerung — the fourth opera in Richard Wagner’s cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen (premiered 1876)

**Wagner’s opera tetralogy, Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung), completed in 1874 begins and ends with the Rhinemaidens in the legendary Rhine River. The evil dwarf Alberich steals the gold, which the Rhine maidens are charged with protecting. This sets in motion four operas on themes of a quest for power, greed, love, and the betrayal and murder of the hero Siegfried by Hagen, son of Alberich. At the end of the fourth opera, Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods), the overarching theme of “redemption through love” is enacted by the immolation of Brünnhilde (wife of Siegfried) as self-sacrifice. It is followed by the complete collapse of Valhalla, resplendent home of the gods, and the dramatic overflowing of its banks by the Rhine, whose guardian maidens reclaim the purified gold to its rightful home.

***Gregor Samsa. A human transformed into a giant insect. Protagonist of Franz Kafka’s novella The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915).

Backstory to “Who Will Write a Requiem for the Earth?” 

Ever since I came to love classical music, I have been drawn to vocal and choral works, especially masses and requiems (largely, though not entirely, Roman Catholic). Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Bruckner, Berlioz, Verdi, Faure, Janacek, Britten, and others have carried me through the full emotional cycle: hope, despair, tenderness, yearning, dread.

A requiem is a mass for the dead, ostensibly for one person. In the hands of a great composer, it becomes something else: consolation offered to all humankind. Lux Aeterna, eternal light. Eternal hope.

But what if the dead are not only people? What if the earth itself is dying, killed by misnamed Homo sapiens, “the wise”? Who remains to write, let alone perform, a requiem for our blue pearl in the heavens? No composer, no orchestra, no chorus, no one left to grieve, let alone remember.

The question haunts me. It includes environment, ecology, climate change, but it is too vast for any neat paragraph to contain. What language can wrap its arms around horror beyond imagination, yet imagined, nonetheless?

But maybe to say it aloud in a poem could be a tiny beginning to pulling back from the black hole’s abyss of our own making.

2.
Bird Feeder in Winter

Birds come to our feeder,
Thinking it is part
Of the natural habitat.
They do not know that in winter
We worry lest they starve.
The feeder swings with abandon
In the cold wind.
These birds do not know
We are watching.

Backstory to “Bird Feeder in Winter”

How quaint, picturesque, and sometimes thoughtful is the widespread practice in the USA — and likely elsewhere — of hanging a bird feeder outside one’s house window in winter (and other seasons). Sometimes we can name the birds, observe squirrels make every imaginable convoluted movement to access the birdseed for themselves. There are an infinite number of often-humorous bird watcher stories that can come from looking through the window at activity at the bird feeder.

However, since this bird feeder phenomenon is so ordinary, why bother writing a poem about it? How can there possibly be anything new?

For as long as I can remember, I identified with the birds, maybe projected myself onto and into them. I imagined myself to be a bird in his or her predicament, foraging for food— now, in a scarce season. Danger would be on my mind. Bearing witness to this scene, I sensed the birds’ urgency to find food when nothing was growing, and especially when ground and limb were snow-covered. They could starve; they could die, and many did, I realized. The black hole of snow-packed starvation may pass unnoticed to our eyes, but birds live precariously close to their time horizon. To them, it is not negligible at all.

Is it entirely projection on my part to imagine that at least some of the visitors associated it with respite from danger and death, a kind of oasis in the desert? From this bearing witness to what imagined was going through “bird brains,” emerged this brief poem.

3.
The Blake Place

When they homesteaded in the 1950’s,
Theirs was the only farm around:
Unpainted wood frame house, barn,
Corral, a few horses, unattended front yard,
Scattered scrub oak trees as hardscrabble
As the Blakes were.
Beyond the yard, a dirt road;
Across the road, a wide sea
Of more prairie grass.

In every direction, only a few wheat fields,
Wild grasses, and critters;
A mile or two away, another farm.
The Blake place was
Far enough away from anyone
For them to feel secure.
It was not empty, just uncrowded.

Ron Blake ran a small herd of horses
On a property in southeast Oklahoma,
Brought a few at a time to his farm
In central Oklahoma to breed.
Ron, Ella, the horses, and the scraggliest
Excuse for a dog you’d ever see —
The entire cast of characters.
It stayed that way for over two decades.
Though only a handful of acres,
The place felt big. Beyond the Blake
Property, they could see
Everywhere unimpeded.
They liked it that way.
Their world was the world.
“Town,” for Saturday shopping
For essentials, was “over there,”
And they wanted it to stay there.

Then the city several miles away
Began making its way in their direction.
People settled in Oklahoma
From other states and countries.
A few houses cropped up nearby —
Some, small, simple wood frame,
Others, large wood and brick
One-story homes often
Surrounded by tall fences.
Then came more, and with them,
Loud noises from construction.
At the corner where
Two paved streets met,
Then soon up and down the road,
A hodge-podge of establishments grew:

Gas stations, fast-food restaurants,
Car service garages, cleaners, donut shops,
Quick stop grocery stores,
Fortune tellers, store-front churches,
Automobile parts stores,
Interspersed with houses and driveways.
The area sprawled for miles,
The Old World gone,
A New World in its place.
Blackjack, post oak, and scrub oak
Trees mostly vanished. No more
Fields of weeds for running cattle
And space for growing wheat. No more
Could you see “forever” in all directions.
Within two or three decades, the region
Has been occupied, overtaken.

For decades, the Blake place
Was the only farm around;
Today it is empty, an exception, an eyesore,
Reduced to mostly parched grass,
Occasionally mowed by the realtor.

Long before it was torn down,
It had already been erased from history.
Today, only the metal corral fence remains —
House and barn bulldozed to rubble,
An entire world hauled away to the dump.

The Blake place is not worth remembering.

Backstory to “The Blake Place”

The decades of life experience long before I wrote the poem, became part of my bloodstream, and later came to haunt me. The poem is an act of bearing witness both to something precious in my life, and whose ending was, at least to me, tragic if not evil. Although urbanization, development, progress are not, in the poet’s eyes, inherently destructive, when they become the only good, erasing all others, their results can and do cause much suffering and grief.

From the late 1970’s through 2023, I knew Joe and Tracy Blake, their old wood-frame house, their horse Bronc (first, among others), their corral, the barn at the back of the corral). Joe and Tracy were the immediate neighbors to the apartment complex in which I lived in Bethany, Oklahoma — originally a separate, Nazarene-found town, spatially separate from Oklahoma City, and not virtually surrounded by The City. The poem attempts to describe and evoke the experience of what that felt like.

When the young Blake couple purchased the tract of land and built their simple wood-frame house, horse barn and corral, they were the only people living in the area. Everything was wild grassland. No other people or houses were with sight. They inhabited an isolated, private island, which was what they dreamed of having.

Fast forward to the 1980’s, the Blake property was surrounded by homes, from boxes of wood to large ranch-style houses, gasoline stations, business establishments of all kinds, and major streets with traffic and noise. The quiet, isolated island had long been engulfed by urban growth and sprawl. Joe and Tracy felt surrounded, engulfed, and withdrew into out-of-step way of life. They continued to breed horses occasionally, transported them to an open-field property some forty miles away so they could run free, ran a few cattle there, and had little to do with their human neighbors.

Somehow, in the early 1980’s I came by to introduce myself as a neighbor, and we quickly became close friends, despite wide differences in culture and politics. In the early 1990’s, when my wife and I had a son, the Blake couple practically adopted him, let him have the run of their small house, play in their living room as they watched TV. I would often sit outside with Joe, on rusty chairs and old, unbalanced wood chairs, drink coffee, visit about rural farming life, raise horses, and running cattle. Eventually, they aged, became sick, and died, leaving the house and property empty.

For several years it sat as a ghostly reminder of the distant past. Eventually, house, barn, everything was torn down, leaving a barren spot that, five decades earlier, had been the only inhabited place within miles. I grieved my friends’ deaths, and the erasure of history. Eventually, I wrote this poem as a memorial to them and to their world. Can a poem rescue people and places and history itself from the black hole of erasure?

4.
War Horses*

War horses, pot boilers,
Music ever-faster, ever-louder,
Orchestras play.
It’s off to the races,
Round the bend,
Steeds hurtle together,
Stampede to the finishing line.
If not orchestras,
Then violinists, pianists.
Cellists, vocalists.
Music is spectacle.
Speed is grotesque
Virtuosity is all.

Musical bombast deafens,
But still is not loud enough.
Subtlety, gradation,
Perish, as allegro
Swells into prestissimo,
While forte
Drowns in fortissimo.
What player even remembers
When moderato was still
Welcome to the listener’s ear?

Favorites overplayed — though
Never played enough;
Performances blur,
Homogeneous perfection.
Substitute one conductor for another,
You’d hardly know the difference.
Like the perfectly
Lubricated machinery
In Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis,
All pieces come to sound alike;
Repetition reveals only
What you’ve heard
A hundred times before —
Audiences cheer
To the thrill of the same…

The list of war horses
Reads like a menu:
Take Sibelius’ Finlandia,
Liszt’s Les Preludes,
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony,
Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony,
Wagner’s Ride of Valkyries,
Verdi’s Requiem,
Rossini’s William Tell Overture…

And then, marvel of the cosmos,
Appears an unforeseeable miracle:
A piece of music I have known
Nearly all my life, familiar
Exactly ‘how it should go,”
Sounds as if I am
Hearing it for the first time —
A cliché revived —
I ask myself, “Where have you been
All my life? How could I have been
So wrong for so long?”
Both the music and I,
New and renewed.

*Previously published as:
Stein, S. (2023). War horses [poem]. Psychohistory News, 42(4), 9.

Backstory to “War Horses”

Ever since before I can remember, I have loved classical music. It is as vital a part of my bloodstream as are white cells and platelets. Likewise, from my early years, I began to recognize that certain pieces of music were frequently programmed at live concerts, radio broadcast concerts, and classical music radio programs. Not only were they popular and familiar but came to be included in a category called “war horses.” I have never had anything against profound music played frequently; I learned them, and I learned from them.

But I soon came to recognize that these so-called standard “war horses” were often performed perfunctory, as if an orchestra were a well-oiled machine that turned out every piece the same, or were over-blown, exaggerated, bombastic monstrosities that inevitably drew thunderous ovations from the audience. In both instances, to my ears and spirit, they were dead — and had little to do with the composer’s intent.

Let me offer a brief example. Franz Liszt’s tone poem, Les Preludes, is featured on countless “pop” concerts, summer festival concerts, light music programs, radio programming. Much of the time, everything is loud, hyped-up, great latitude taken by conductors with composers’ directions, rhythm, rubato (flexibility of slowness and fastness), with the result that the music sounded unmusical, even grotesque to me. I even developed contempt for the piece itself, as another (supposed) example of Liszt’s lack of seriousness as a composer.

Then, decades ago, I heard a radio broadcast of James Conlon conducting Les Preludes with a Dutch radio orchestra (I think). I was spellbound, as I had never really heard this music before. This was not bombast, but a deep musical meditation on life. Conlon, a conductor I have long subsequently admired, treated Les Preludes with the seriousness and urgency it deserved.

He redeemed it from warhorse-dom, from triviality. He brought it back to life from the beaten-to-death condition and gave me new respect for Liszt. I went back to listening to many others of the composer’s works, performed by conductors and pianists I esteemed. I became a convert.

This vignette and the story of which it is a part, was the “seed crystal” in a super-saturated solution of war horses, that inspired the poem. In a way, this is a poem of protest, a bearing witness to cultural destruction, and a plea for a return to the composer’s intentions instead of being a crowd-pleaser.

It is perhaps akin to visual art in removing the encrusted layers of tradition from the genuine painting underneath, an act of restoration. Over time, the years if not decades and centuries of encrusted overlays have completely distorted (disappeared) the original painting and created a new, disfigured one in its place, then calling it the original! Perhaps the poem is a hope to revive dead music from murder-by-tradition, hardly a natural death at all. Can we rescue and revive music from the death sentence of being a war horse – a black hole of meaningless, repetitive, lifeless sound?

5.
The Haunted Hayfield

A wintered hayfield
Sits out of place —
Has, as long as anyone
Can remember.
No grass has grown for years.

Spring does not visit
This pale, brittle straw
Of chaff and stubble —
Only skeletal remains
That cannot be stirred
Dwell here — abandoned
To mice, cats, hawks,
And a wealth of insects.

Everywhere beyond it,
Flowers and bushes
Have burst their winter crypt.
Pastel green auras
Hover around every kind of tree.
Azaleas and rosebud strut
Their brief finery of purples
And reds. Spring shouts
Life’s gleeful return.

But the silent hayfield
Can only scowl at
The expansive, restless city,
As it overtakes
Its wild grass periphery.

Vast seas of concrete
Parking lots,
Blaring city lights that
Rival a full moon,
Buildings that sprawl wide
And climb high —
What is dead hay
In the face
Of such splendor and zest?

Across the street
From the mysterious patch
An old folks’ home stands,
As out of place and time
As the hayfield.

Each day, I observe
This rectangular swath from
My second story apartment,
In a facility called
“Assisted living” — in truth,
A holding pattern encircling death.

Every time, I wonder whether
The barren ground will
Someday reawaken to life —
Or will it sail as the Dutchman’s
Spectral ship, condemned
Forever to haunt the seas,
Doomed never to find
A port called home?

Much as I stare at it,
The old sod gives
No hint of awakening.
Its bristles and crust
Are not fallow;
This hayfield will never again
Bear fruit. “But why?”,
It never ceases to ask —

It cannot disclose a secret
It does not even know,
For some ancient misdeed, perhaps,
It only knows it has been cursed.

Backstory to “The Haunted Hayfield”

In early January 2023, with only a few days’ notice, and chance to physically let alone emotionally, prepare, my family placed me in an assisted living facility. For 25 years, we lived in the same house, and neighborhood, embedded in a forest of scrub oak, post oak, and blackjack trees, birds and squirrels, and people we had become close friends with.

Further, virtually every Friday since early 1978, I had driven 90 miles northwest to teach behavioral science with second- and third-year residents in a university-affiliated family medicine clinic in Enid, Oklahoma. I loved and looked forward to the pre-dawn drives, immersed in vast seas of hard red winter wheat, wild grasslands, pastures for cattle, farmhouses, barns, grain silos, and towns along the way. I witnessed gorgeous sunrises and often sunsets on this flat, southern Great Plains region. Certainly, I did not look forward to driving in severe, often tornadic weather and ice storms. I soon came to “specialize” in rural medicine and health. All this was my second home, my send-of place in the world.

In what felt like an ambush, I was suddenly uprooted to a large assisted and independent living facility miles away, one located in an area that contained many such elderly residents’ institutions, and skilled nursing and nursing home facilities. My family, and assisted living staff, all hoped I would feel “settled” and “at home” here, while I felt exiled.

Admittedly, my family did not force me out. Rather, going to assisted living was my only option. With my history of Parkinson’s and peripheral neuropathy, and several falls, they felt I would be unsafe at home and did not wish to be my caregivers or hire them, whey they said would be too expensive.

Medical opinion was divided on how essential assisted living was to my well-being. As I soon found out, the vigilance and care that had been emphasized in our interviews there, and that had been a feature of their promotional material, was far from true in the reality of day-to-day living. Nonetheless, my family members clearly wanted to have separate lives of their own.

The windows in my 400 square foot apartment pointed due west, making for often hot afternoons even in winter. When I looked out the windows, I saw two large asphalt and concrete parking lots, separated by a strip of grass, bare grass areas between several buildings, including a church, and a few small trees. To my eyes and soul, the scene was barren and desolate, lifeless, especially when compared with my previous life.

My wife hastened to direct my eyes slightly to the right, where there was a long rectangular strip of land that was a hayfield. She emphasized that I could look at it and imagine the rural Oklahoma I had come to love. Although I had failed to notice it at first, in fact it occupied only a small part of the vista outside. A thin strip of sky above all this allowed me to see parts of lovely sunsets.

At night, the combination of many bright city lights and floodlights pointed to the facility to help protect it, blinded me, so that I could never see planets or stars, only the moon for several days of the month in early evening. There was no point in my protesting the decision for me to live here, only for me to find a way to adapt to the sudden, massive change. Even as I begin my third year here and have developed something of “a life,” the sense of trauma, that I am not truly my-self here, persists.

In the midst of all these changes, the seed of an idea for a poem took root in my mind. Its focus would be on the supposedly redemptive hayfield that should help me to feel at home. I remain unsure — and troubled — whether my wife’s concern was sincere and meant to be comforting, or manipulative, opportunistic, and self-serving. I fear it is the latter as if to say: “Here, Howard, is your rural Oklahoma! Savor it!” as she laughs raucously inside.

The poem grew to become my quiet reply to my wife’s expressed hope that the hayfield would provide some sense of continuity with my former life and thus give me comfort and a sense of place. The poem articulates — not merely expresses — what the hayfield came to feel like and to represent to me. The poem is rooted in what hayfields actually are — then is supersaturated with my projections and contempt.

The hayfield itself is blameless; it can only be what it is. The black hole is the disrespect and hatred I felt when I was institutionalized “for my own good.” I still inhabit the precarious time horizon of the black hole. Writing poems, and sharing them, helps prevent my being drawn into it.

6.
Hurt        

No I remains,
Only hurt.
After its siege,
Hurt swallowed
Me alive.

No one, nothing
Left behind to hurt;
Only hurt survives.

Flawed parts of speech
Do not rescue:
No noun, no verb,
Both helpless.
I do not hurt;
Hurt replaced me
With itself.

Being dissipates
Into nothingness,*
As smoke,
Leaves behind only
Flakes of ash
And hurt.

Where I was,
There hurt shall be.**

*Allusion to Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le néant, 1943)
**Allusion to Sigmund Freud: “Where id was, there ego shall be.” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (1933).

Backstory to “Hurt”

This little poem is an urgent “play on words.” It comes from lived experience, my own, that of people in my family and my “tribe,” Jews. It comes from fifty years of teaching, being taught by, and working with doctors and a wide cast of other kinds of health care professionals, in their years as students, residents, apprentices, their teachers, their countless organizations in and for which they work, and the recipients of that supposed “health-care,” patients and their families.

I think that hurt is simpler, more immediate, “experience-near,” an idea than the word pain. The changing meanings and referents of hurt in the poem trace an evolution in my own experience — and I expect that of many people. First, say, some specific, bounded part of my body hurts, as a wound from an accident. Toward the other extreme of this imagined “scale,” my entire body hurts, as often with flu and certainly COVID-19.

The final, perhaps existential, end of this imagined measurement is when my life itself utterly hurts and hurt comes to define me and my experience. The death of a loved one, the experience of millions of people in Nazi concentration camps, is where life itself is one giant hurt. There is no one, nothing, left to one-self. Self = hurt. Life = hurt. The black hole of hurt devours and disappears all sense of being alive.

7.
Short on Staff, or “You’d Better Listen”

Today the CEO
met with his inner circle
of upper management
and executive board.
They sat silently around
a massive conference table,
in elegantly crafted,
hardwood chairs with
supple leather seats.

As the CEO took his place
at the head of the table,
he scanned them
with a predator’s eyes,
then began softly:
“I’m not telling you
anything you don’t already know.
“We’ve been terribly
short on staff
in every department
since COVID-19 struck
in early 2020. And it
doesn’t seem like it’s
going away soon. So —
What comes next?

Long pause, then
he continued, “I’ll tell you:
we turn calamity
into opportunity!
You ask: How can that be?
What I am about
to say to you
does not leave
this room: “Worker shortage”
is now our official story,
our policy, our strategy,
our slogan, our secret.
You and I have got to get
employees to buy into it,
to believe it as their truth.

You and I need them
to be convinced we’re
doing this for their best interests,
that some vague place down the road,
they’ll reap a bountiful harvest
in wages, overtime,
and increased benefits —
you and I together,
must chant this in unison
every day.

“Do you get this great idea?
It’s so simple!” he exclaimed,
almost ecstatic, as he offered
his perfect plot
to the assembled body
of corporate nobility.
“You around this table,
our company, and most important,
our shareholders, will get more
by giving our workers less —
lower pay, reduced benefits,
less sick leave, less vacation time.
We demand that they
show stronger commitment
through more strenuous effort.
What a blessed deception!

You’ve got to admit —
it’s a sterling idea:
we milk their sacrifice
and their trust in us that
worker shortage is real.
They would never think that
the cause of the scarcity is
our own refusal
to hire more employees!

You want them convinced
we’re the good guys and
market forces are the bad guys —
circumstances are the villain,
and that we would
rush to their aid,
if only we could.
They’ll never imagine that
we’re their “circumstances”!

Well, what do you think of
this Sucker Economics?
Two-faced is fail-safe!
You get it now?
You tell me — if people
don’t realize they’re
being used and cheated,
what harm does the policy bring?
You know — our employees
even believe they are
doing something virtuous,
helping fellow workers
contribute to the company —
so why would you
want to interfere
with such good Samaritans?

What a gift
To be
Short on staff!

Backstory to “Short on Staff, or “You’d Better Listen”

Throughout history, many employers have exploited their dedicated workers, exacting much and giving little in return. Opportunism and cruelty sustained employees’ misery. I wrote this poem against the backdrop of the world-wide COVID-19^th pandemic of the early 2020’s. Millions of people became near-deathly sick, and millions died.

Workplaces of all kinds were strained to keep performing their tasks and productivity — as countless workers were out sick (quarantined for weeks) and countless employees died. Co-workers from hospitals and clinics to factories and corporations became quiet heroes for weeks, months, even several years. They did their utmost to fill in for the voids left in the “workforce.”

They often did the work of two people, even three; stayed for long hours, often were not paid for overtime; worked double shifts. Dedication became devotion. For so many, work became a commitment to help, to get work done against impossible odds. For many, the work and the workplace became a moral cause as well as a job. Countless people worked to exhaustion, beyond exhaustion. For many, what is called “secondary trauma” (being constantly in the presence and company of traumatized people, and in turn themselves traumatized).

Throughout healthcare facilities, doctors and nurses got behind, could not keep up with the soaring need for care. In medicine as in all professions and occupations, replacements, even temporary ones, were difficult to find — many potential substitute employees were also sick or dead. Working closely together, helping each other, being attentive to each other as never before, they accomplished the impossible — which was still never enough.

Sometimes organizational management and executives were attentive, even expressed gratitude. For the most part, self-sacrifice at work became expected, both from without and from within. Management and boards of companies could not help but notice how much additional work was becoming accomplished with fewer and fewer employees, and even resources.

Eventually, the COVID-19 plague began to abate, partly due to the scale of treatment, and partly due to the arrival of the first vaccines–prevention. To be sure, many people have continued to become ill, need hospitalization, and many still have died. Subsequent “waves” of new mutated strains of COVID appeared. It still is not over, despite many officials’ insistence on “return to normal.” “The new normal,” as it is euphemistically called, remains life at cliff’s edge.

As workplaces everywhere became accustomed to high quality “productivity” with fewer employees, many corporate executives, boards of trustees, and other upper management, became calculating opportunists. If employees in all occupations could do more with less under emergency conditions, why not act as if these emergency circumstances were now ordinary, and NOT try to re-hire the workforce to its previous level, and offer the same packages of benefits? In many places, situation-based necessities born of COVID have been transmuted into clever, sleazy, deceptive, rationalized opportunism — the exploitation if not poisoning of vulnerable employees.

Against this long historic backdrop, my “narrative” poem emerged. If I might use categories to characterize how I imagine it: it is a poem of protest, of saying openly a secret most everyone knows, and of bearing witness both to human suffering and to the infliction of harm. Maybe workplaces can become all-consuming black holes of evil that consume the human spirit of those in their midst.

8.
Imperfect Leaf

Neither yellow, nor golden,
Nor deep-flaming red;
Torn, leathered, shriveled,
Brown-freckled instead.
Irregular, worm-eaten,
An aesthete’s raw grief;
I speak on behalf of
An imperfect leaf.

Backstory to “Imperfect Leaf”

I wrote this tiny poem in the 1990’s, at a time when I was writing many poems on scrub oak, blackjack, and post oak trees and leaves in Central Oklahoma, where I live, and on cottonwood in Ghost Ranch, in northern New Mexico, where I attended a fall retreat for over 25 years. I would pick up splendid, “complete” leaves, beautiful leaves, carefully place them in a file folder, and put them in the pages of a large, heavy book back home, e.g., a dictionary, a scholarly book, a Bible.

The leaf behind this poem would ordinarily have been overlooked, scorned, relegated to mulch. Yet I stopped, picked it up, kept it, and placed in some thick book where it probably still is. Aesthetically, everything imaginable was wrong with it.

It was woefully incomplete, downright ugly, throw-away, worthy only of being ignored or decayed into the ground. Yet I leaned forward, picked it up, carefully packed it, and within a couple of years wrote a poem about it.

The poem’s history as a typescript/manuscript has been remarkable and unexpected. The poem came to mean to many other people more than it did to me. Over the decades, several health and mental health friends have tacked it on their office or home bulletin boards.

One close friend and professor tacked it on his office bulletin board and, when counseling students who were despondent over the class performance, even their lives, because they were imperfect, took the poem down and made a copy for them. It became a part of their conversation, a quasi-therapeutic relationship. I was gratified both to be understood and my work to be put to use as a bona fire ‘applied’ poem.

This brief poem is one of my very few with end-rhyme and meter. If the poem speaks for me, it still, after over four decades, still speaks to me as well. Like the leaf I picked up for no good reason, the poem is a trifle – yet also a kind of door that made me re-think “What matters in life?” In noticing it, picking it up, placing it in a safe place, and writing about it, could I have rescued this small leaf from the black hole of disappearance into invisibility?

9.
Fullness of Fall*

I linger in the woods
Long after the leaves
Have passed their peak.
I await sunset through bare limbs.

Summer was a fine dream,
And spring is for next year’s sprigs.
It is time now
For the fullness of fall.

*Previously published in Spring 2020, in Harbinger Asylum, Transcendent Zero Press.

Backstory to “Fullness of Fall”

All the eight decades of my life, many people have told me that I think “weird,” strange, so different from “normal” people. I have written many poems about autumn, most of them about leaves’ final flowering before winter, decline, loss, decay, the descent from fullness and aliveness to barrenness and emptiness. Put simply, autumn’s deceptive Presence is mere prelude to Absence.

Many years ago, my dear friend, the psychoanalyst David Levine and I wrote a book called A Low Autumn Sun (2003; BookSurge, Charleston, South Carolina). It consisted of color photographs of trees, bushes, and grasses that he took and poems that I had written, matched and paired into a book, by David’s wife, Pamela Wolfe. It was, in a way, an “answer” in something of a visual and poetic Reality Principle to contra with the yellows of red and sugar maples, Kousa dogwood, black gum, sassafras, among other trees in New England in September and October. In words and image, it’s shown where autumn’s foliage finery at last gives way.

It is not that we were aesthetically “wrong,” but bark-naked, silhouetted trees are very much alive and have their own distinct beauty. We who cannot see with the heart can only think of late fall as a black hole of bleakness that may never return. This poem is an exception to the experience of autumn as a season of the raking clean the thick greenness of summer and preparation for the cold siege of winter.

Could autumn be about life and aliveness as well as of death and dying? Maybe absence of leaves reveals a new, different kind of Presence — if only we allow to see and think in terms of both-and rather than either/or (splitting, binary). This brief poem attempts to address this question — not only about the cycle of seasons, but about the cycle of the seasons of human life. Maybe wintered starkness is its own kind of beauty. Maybe the finality of fall is no black hole at all.

10.
Lunchtime, or Nobody’s Home*

Despite new hearing aids,
I do not hear summons
To lunch. I must take my cue
From watching others
Get up from their recliners —
With or without assistance —
To walk to the eating area
Of the senior day care center.
Four parallel rows
Of folding tables occupy the back
Of this vast, rectangular room.
A fifth row sits perpendicular
To the others, this one for
“Participants” who require assistance
From nursing aides for eating and drinking.
Administrators and staff mandate
That we be not called “patients.”

A slow, clumsy walking
Parkinsonian laggard,
I arrive at the tables and catch sight
Of an empty chair next to a woman,
Perhaps in her eighties, with wild
White hair. I sit next to her, smile,
Say hello, grateful to find
A place still unoccupied.
I ask her how she was today.
She smiles but says no words.
I notice she speaks with no one.
I conclude that she is not communicative —
I have “concluded” a lot in my life.
I try several times to engage her
With eye contact and a few words,
With no response except for a brief smile.
Then she disappears.

We all sit patiently at the tables, wait
For nurses’ aides to bring Styrofoam
Trays with molded compartments of food.
Styrofoam cups with ice water and
Small packets of plastic utensils
Already sit on the tables as place settings.
I have not noticed I lack them.

Suddenly my silent companion
Reaches across the table from
Where she sits, carefully lifts
A cup of ice water and places it
In front of me. She follows
With reaching for the adjacent
Plastic utensil pack, opens it,
And places its contents in front of me.
I turn to her, nod my gratitude,
And thank her. She returns
A slight smile, then retreats
To her world — my world, now
Overturns with amazement over
What has just happened.

Soon, staff members bring
Trays of hot lunch, place one
In front of each of us.
I notice that they give
Some of us a small carton of milk.
I ask if I could also have one.
An aide brings one and sets it,
With its paper-sheathed straw,
To the upper left outside my tray.
I thank her and continue
With my meal. As I eat,
The milk carton sits unopened.

Suddenly my silent companion
Reaches slowly for the carton,
Clasps it in her right hand,
Then brings it in front of her.
With much effort she opens it,
Though with only enough room
For the straw to fit in.
She then meticulously unsheathes
The straw, puts the paper down,
And inserts the straw.
I wonder what her next
Step will be — keep it
For herself or return it to me,
Ready to drink. Without hesitation,
She carefully lifts the carton
With her right hand and arm,
And places it to the left of my tray,
Precisely where she had gotten it.
I look toward her with a grin,
Thank her. Her voice makes some
Gentle sound of acknowledgment;
Her eyes smile at me.
We both return to eating our lunch.

I sit spellbound at what
Just happened. When I first
Sat next to her at the table,
I was sure “nobody was home.”
Perhaps dementia or Alzheimer’s
Made whoever she once was disappear.
Now that I realize
What she has just done,
I am certain
I am the one
Who is “not home.”
I disappear her,
Then cannot recognize
How much “there” she is —
On her own terms.

Maybe I will learn
To observe
As well as she does,
And to be as thoughtful
As she is.

*Previously published as:
Stein, H.F. (2024). Lunchtime, or nobody’s home [poem]. In “Unexpected life lessons from unexpected places” poetry collection. MindConsiliums, 24(3), 7-9.
https://doi.org/10.70763/m5e388103a391daabe3de1d76a6739ccd

Backstory to “Lunchtime, or Nobody’s Home”

This poem is a story about my slowly emerging gratitude toward and for a person I had at first completely “written off” as uncommunicative and beyond reach. It is also about my gratitude toward some part of myself who is often pleasantly surprised and pleased to be wrong, and to be able to learn something entirely new – and how that processes can transform my relationships. This “old lady” who I had dismissed is one of my finest teachers.

The event – relationship — I am about to describe occurred in a daily living center for senior people and adolescents. I have attended there most Tuesdays and Wednesdays for 5 or 6 years. It is the place I most call “home” and have the sense of being at home, cared for, respected, loved. The event occurred during lunch, at which time the entire group sits at long, folding tables with simple, but comfortable chairs.

I sat by a very elderly woman, perhaps in her 90’s, who moved very slowly. I turned toward her, I thought I said Hello, and she responded softly likewise, then turned back. The poem is about what happened after that — something so seemingly simple, but which awakened me from my utterly wrong assumptions about who and what my table-mate was.

We actually connected, though not in any way I could have expected. I was ashamed I had dismissed her as unreachable, and was grateful for how much she, and our simple relationship, taught me. It turns out that I was the black hole who pulled her into my mind’s death trap of prejudices and write-off as a fellow human being.

11.
Tapiola*

Hot, damp August air,
dense¬ in these eastern Oklahoma
woods —
I linger here for hours,
partake of the mystery
Sibelius found in Tapio’s* home —
forest draped in longing and dread.

Far up the canopy,
leaves glow translucent
from a high sun;
few rays make their way
to the forest floor.

These woods do not
yield their secret.
Spirits dwell here —
they guard their realm in silence.
They lurk but do not speak.

I do not ask about
this forbidding place.
I marvel.
I dream.
I fear.
I stay.

* Previously published in Oklahoma Today (May/June 2023)

** Tapiola is Jean Sibelius’ last large-scale orchestral work, a tone poem, completed in 1926. Its inspiration was the deep Finnish wood, and its spirits and goblins, including Tapio, the forest spirit, who is prominent in the Kalevala.

Backstory to “Tapiola”

Tapiola, a tone poem for orchestra, is the last great work of Finnish composer, Jean Sibelius (1926). It portrays the animated Finnish forest spirit, Tapio and his mysterious realm. Sibelius’ music, and the mythology that long informed it, conjures for me my own personal mental geography of the central US.

In this brief poem, I “transpose” the far northern world of Tapio to the dense, musky forests of the rugged but low Ozark hills and mountains. The central and western Oklahoma Great Plains and the eastern Ozark woodlands have for five decades inspired me to write poetry.

Consider, for instance, the contrast in mood and atmosphere between the fury and menace of Tapiola’s Finnish forest with the hard-won gentle and wistful wisdom of Robert Frost’s poem, “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” the first line of which reads, “Whose woods these are I think I know.” The forest which the spirit Tapio rules is ominous, every step fraught with danger.

In my poem about the eastern Oklahoma Ozark woodlands, I transpose this same apprehensive and intimidating spirit world of Tapio and his kingdom from Sibelius sound-world to my own imagined experience in the thick of things here. What if I get lost? I have no natural signs to point to a way out. I could die and my body could be found long after.

In a way, then, I have refashioned the Oklahoma and Arkansas Ozark Mountains into a beautiful but haunted world that dwells near the time-horizon of a black hole into which I could be swallowed alive.

12.
Earth, From Orbiting Satellite

Within living memory,
An orbiting satellite
Still offered proof earth’s
Seas glowed deep blue;

Now, it can only
Bear witness to the
Crimson red of fresh,
Flowing blood, thick,
Gushing blood,
Unstoppable blood,
That jets from every organ.

Hemoglobin-rich
Blood of indifference,
Blood of hate, blood of vengeance,
Of unforgiveness, a gift given
From generation to generation.
Even the satellite knows
It has seen too much —
But it cannot deny
What it already knows.
Nowhere to hide
In this Red Death*
Of bloodletting,
Nothing, no one, spared —
What Aztec could imagine
Sacrifice on this scale?
Mars, now no longer
The only Red Planet.
Soon earth will
Bleed out — in that final
Moment, when
All
Bleeding
Eventually
Stops.

*Edgar Allan Poe’s 1842 story “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Backstory to “Earth, From Orbiting Satellite”

The poem is a futuristic, perhaps science fiction, nightmare, called “Earth, from Orbiting Satellite.” It is uncompromisingly bleak. It is founded on a poetic “technique” of personification: here the earth and satellite have an identity and voice of their own, although it is one projected by the poet. It offers the protagonists’ perspective, rather than that of the writer.

The primary eyes and voice are those of the satellite who both observe and bear witness to the earth’s self-destruction. It knows it has seen too much, but it cannot deny or turn away from what it now knows. The satellite observes with horror and grief.

The horrific vision offers, though, a vanishing possibility that, as in the final scene of the 1959 movie, On the Beach, “There is still time… Brother.”

It implicitly is a poem of protest, of warning, as if to say to people, “Can’t you see what you are doing?” Issues such as environment, ecology, and climate change are implicit in the story line. Political and corporate vested interests remain unstated, as the poem unfolds through the language and imagery of metaphor. Likewise, the poem is “color-coded,” in the toxic transformation of blue to bloody and bleeding red. If I may choose another color, could the murder of the earth be dropping the entire planet into the black hole of indifference?

13.
Reverie at Lake Overholser*

Each visit is a pilgrimage, to a sanctuary, a shrine. Lake Overholser, in western Oklahoma City, consists of water held back by a dam. I do not ask this engineered backwater to be a Great Lake, only to be mine, my small, quiet place of refuge. I bless the dam that created the lake. No artifice this.

Built in 1919, it was designed with water supply and flood control in mind. A peephole into eternity soon followed its practical inception.

Each time I go there, I mimic this reservoir’s seven-mile shoreline by forming my arms and hands into a circle, as if I could hold the entire basin in the space between where my fingers touch.

I don’t ask for much. A minor forest and marsh around the lake suffice. My spellbound eyes watch egrets and gulls float in low sky with their vast wingspread, dive suddenly for a fish, or alight on the calm water’s surface without disturbing its glaze.

I come often to still my restless heart. This, no slack water pond, but healing balm. Size of circumference is no measure of sanctity. Grandeur comes in miniature as well as monumental. Small stuff is not small stuff in this hallowed space.

I cannot tell you why I return, except that I must. I make no claim I find God here —though maybe He finds me instead. Finding and being found are the rhythm of the place.

Lake Overholser is bliss. I belong to it; it belongs to me. It has Presence. I can feel it in the gulls and hodge-podge trees at shore’s edge. Its aliveness brings me to life. Even raging storms, driving wind, and wild waves do not deter me. Why shouldn’t it have many moods? Their sum is who Overholser is.

Makeshift wildlife refuge — theirs and mine. All because of engineers who built so practical a dam. From there, Nature took over. For me, Overholser is a sacred space, a retreat, where I can stop, linger, and be still. This lake is love’s circumference, loving, and being loved.

*Lake Overholser is a reservoir in western Oklahoma City behind a concrete dam built in 1918. A small, mostly natural park surrounds it and is the home to many bird species, a place for recreation, picnics, fishing, and meditation. The lake covers about 1600 acres, has a seven-mile shoreline, and narrow roads around the circumference.

Backstory to “Reverie at Lake Overholser”

For nearly 45 years, Lake Overholser was my refuge in Nature, sanctuary, place of meditation and prayer, place of quiet and comforting solitude, where I could begin to put myself together again after the emotional onslaughts of workplace and family. This quiet place pulled me back countless times from slipping beneath the time horizon of death-in-life’s black hole.

Lake Overholser was one and two miles distant, respectively, from the condo-reconditioned apartments where I first lived, and then the nearby home where I lived until my 2023 placement in an “assisted living” facility by my family. I often walked or drove to the lake, pulled my car into an out-of-the-way place, and sat, often for hours.

Overholser is one of over 200 man-made lakes in Oklahoma, created largely from damming streams and rivers for water supply, flood control, fishing, small boating. The Lake Overholser dam, made of reinforced concrete, was built between 1917-1919, on the North Canadian River. It is located on the far western side of Oklahoma City and Bethany, has about a seven-mile perimeter, and is home to many species of birds and fishes.

Decades ago, I walked on the walkway atop the dam, and looked out onto the seemingly vast waters, sometimes calm and still, other times with unexpectedly rough waves. Many kinds of “wild” (unplanted) trees, grasses, bushes, and flowers grew on the narrow edge before the two-lane road that encircled the lake.

Compared with “real,” natural lakes, this one was downright puny. Yet in many ways it was a spiritual home for me, where I could feel alive, be my-self, be renewed. It was “medicine” for me, perhaps in the idiom of many American Indian tribes. It helped to restore my body and soul (together). It inspired many kinds of poems, although to my memory it is the only poem I have written about my experience at and of the Lake itself.