Red Letter Poem #243

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.

 

––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #243

 

 

 

 

 

Cellar Bat

The hider’s shadow suddenly unfolds

strange fingers—and the world sets out to fly.

The world stops, opening a cellar door

to watch the 8 it weaves between two lights,

the ceiling low, and narrow-most the walls

in the dim corridor of this surprise

encounter between differently-gifted mammals,

its super-sighted blindness, our stunned eyes


offset and at a standstill as we block

the famed lost soul’s way to its light, the dark

of night behind us… Was the bat as frantic

as our heart’s panic? In bewilderment

it wasn’t shooed from its pattern. We stepped back

and out it came, fluttering meaning as it went.

 

 

––Michael T. Steffen

 

 

 

Here it comes––watch out!  Swooping up from the dark recesses: this unexpected, unnerving presence.  Some might even think it a beautiful terror––depending on how they were first introduced to this species and its fastidious behavior.  No, not just the bat, which the poet Michael T. Steffen confronts in his basement; I’m referring to that other venerable creature––once thought endangered, but which has seen a surprising resurgence in recent times: the sonnet.  I’m willing to bet that, at this very moment, many of you are darting back up to the poem, quickly counting: oh yeah, I hadn’t noticed––fourteen lines, check, split after the octave, (according to the Petrarchan format, rather than the Shakespearean style many more of us had drummed into our fertile minds during high school.)  Yes, a sonnet indeed.  But of course Michael, like many contemporary poets who have returned to the form, hasn’t bothered himself with obeying the dictates of rhyme scheme.  Or has he?  Looking back, I can hear it now: the long-i assonance (fly…lights…surprise…eyes) chiming in the opening stanza, followed by those cutting k-sounds that stitch together the second with off-rhyme and consonance.  And so we can see how the traditional spirit of this ‘little song’ (the meaning of the word the Italians coined for this poetic form) has actually found a lyrical and agile incarnation in this poet’s hands. His is a verse that feels both colloquial and just a bit unearthly––and isn’t that a perfect equivalence for the moment being described?   Sudden surprise prompts our oldest fears to erupt while, at the very same time, the natural world seizes us with its beauty, elevates the heart rate, reminds us (as all good poems must) that we are alive in the moment.

 

And what of this moment?  When the hider unfolds those “strange fingers,” a part of our mind, too, takes flight, turning figure-8’s amid what had been, only seconds earlier, ‘ordinary’.  When Michael refers to his pair of protagonists as “differently-gifted mammals,” suddenly we’re compelled to temper our fear of the ‘other,’ the unknown, and recognize our commonality: the imperative to escape danger and fly toward freedom’s open expanse.  But we slowly become aware of the shifting focus; after all, this is a human mind at work, nature’s great meaning-making machine.  And so, in the final sestet, the poet is already busy devising ways to reconsider what is happening around him, to recast its details so they might reveal something emblematic in what’s taken place.  “We stepped back and out it came, fluttering meaning as it went.”  To my mind, this poem is a fine extended metaphor for the very moment when inspiration takes hold, yanks us from the mundane into something more resonant.  Perhaps, like the bat, a part of our mind uses echolocation to sense where we are in the darkness, and where we (and the poem) need to travel.

 

Michael was the Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award; his work has appeared in a variety of publications including The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, and The Concord Saunterer.  His second collection, On Earth As It Is, was published in 2022 by Cervena Barva Press and demonstrates the mind of a humanist wrestling with the inner and outer realities of life in these United States.  “Cellar Bat” is taken from Storage, a manuscript-in-progress consisting of 64 sonnets, exploring and innovating various aspects of the form.  Michael has an interest in the performance of poetry as well as its impact on the page, and so he’s been staging choral readings of important long-form poems from the modern canon, including Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” and Donald Hall’s “The One Day.”  But, in his own work, I think the shorter lyric is still the place where his talents shine.  His singing weaves in and out between beauty, suffering, memory, creation––so perhaps this humble Chiroptera is something of a spirit-animal for the poet.  Michael registers the invisible echoes bouncing off the world so that his poem can whirl and veer, describing patterns in the darkness a reader’s mind might follow.

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

 

 

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* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

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And coming soon:

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