Stephen Lewandowski's O Lucky One

O Lucky One, Stephen Lewandowski's tenth book of poems, again shows his profound gifts. His poems have the sparseness and clarity that you'd expect from someone who has dedicated his life to preserving the environment. He sees the world in all of its line and color, weight and shape, and he can tell us about natural facts in language that always rings true. But there's more to his writing, of course, than this.

Like Emerson and Thoreau and the other great transcendentalists of the 19th Century, Stephen has the gift of sensing spiritual facts beneath the natural facts he sees so clearly and describes so exactly. In each of his poems, he brings us to a place and somehow finds a way of showing us the mystery there.

 

In many ways, what he does is harder than what Emerson and Thoreau did. When these writers walked out into the forest or looked up at the stars, people still believed that the woods and the stars were worth looking at and that in their shadows and brightness some kind of truth lay that could touch us.

Stephen, for all his Polish heritage and his "otherness," still has this faith and a way of holding these shadows and lights in his hand so that we can see what he sees, understand what he does.

Here are two poems from O Lucky One:

BARE HILL BY STARLIGHT

To get to Bare Hill
look for that dark spot
on the map.
You may walk up
a rough road
into sunlight
reflected from clouds,
but once the darkness
comes, a fire is set
and roars into the night.
At the call to dance,
there's a ring or two
around the dying fire.
When we stumble down
feeling with our feet
for the dark path we
follow that stream
of stars.


MEETING THE BEAR

At night
bears flow
like some dark
force
through the trees
they turn logs
and stones
to lick up food
their thick fur
absorbs starlight
to become bear-shaped
black holes

One slips down from
a weedy road bank
and without a look
enters the field
illuminated by my car
soaking up
every ounce of light-
for a moment
there is no car
no driver
no time
no road
no bear
now we breathe
deep and travel on

_____________________________


Stephan Lewandowski has been busy working with soil conservation for 24 years, preservation of historic places, and environmental protection. For the past ten years, he has supported himself as a consultant specializing in watershed protection.

His book O Lucky One is available from Foothills Publishing.

His poems also have appeared in Scream Online and Kritya.

His essays about his life and his work are available online at The Crooked Lake Review.

Stephen Lewandowski and Helen Ruggieri Write about Their Fathers

Over the years, poets Stephen Lewandowski and Helen Ruggieri have collaborated on a series of poems and short essays about their fathers that says something essential about the way all of our fathers have touched us and keep touching us.

This writing now appears at The Scream on Line, an online journal of the arts, culture, and literature. If you scroll down The Scream's contents page the collaboration appears under the heading Poetry.

Here's one of the short essays from Steve and Helen's collection:

VISITING MY FATHER

Stephen Lewandowski

I was thirteen when my mother and I drove to Buffalo to visit my father in the hospital. He’d been there several months but he was too sick to see us, the doctors said. Now, they said, he’d improved enough so that our visit might be a good thing for him.

Before we arrived, I knew from talk in the family that they’d tried shock therapy on him. Nothing else had worked for long, so they hoped that shock might be an improvement. I thought of the Frankenstein monster shocked into life, but this was different, wasn’t it?

When the orderlies brought him into the visiting room, at first I couldn’t even be sure that it was him, he was so thin and pale. He wasn’t wearing his clothes-- he was dressed in scrubs the same as the orderlies. His eyes had always been blue, but now they were different, light and shallow, vacant.

At first there was no recognition in his face. He looked drawn and tired, but then the blue of his eyes seemed to deepen and spread, and he saw my mother and me, sitting and waiting for him. His gaze became intelligent. He understood who we were and took us in. The doctor had been talking about his improvement, and my mother and I had gone on about news at home, but finally he said, “Thanks for coming to visit me.” He didn’t have much to say about where he had been, but in a few words he returned to us.

On the trip home, that change in his eyes is what I remembered and turned over in my mind. Who was that person who, at first, didn’t remember us? Who recovered and slowly returned to the man we knew so well?