by Arthur J. Stewart
This third collection of forty-six poems and two essays leads the reader through a gnarly wood of learning and teaching science.
Stewart states that science education is itself an integral aspect of science: science stems from personal experience and is transferred in part to the next generation of scientists through parents, science mentors, and teachers. We cannot escape the personal aspects in such transfer, and there are in fact powerful reasons to understand and embrace personal aspects of science.
978-0-9819238-4-0
$15.00
Circle, Turtle, Ashes
Reviews
“In this third collection of poems and essays, scientist Art Stewart writes about life and death. Driven by the death of the poet’s father, he examines influence and learning, and what these mean for living and legacy. As always, Stewart connects science and literature through careful choice of words, and echoes his strong belief that young scientists can enhance communication skills through understanding and use of poetry.”
—Jim Johnston
“Circle, Turtle, Ashes is about a journey— a journey we are all on, in our own different ways. Art Stewart brings the clarity of a scientist to poetry. The bones of life are laid bare for us to pick over, browse, consider. This moving collection reminds us of our place in the natural world. “ –Professor Anne Osbourn, Associate Research Director, John Innes Centre, Norwich, UK
“Art Stewart invites us to travel with him through the various stages of boyhood and initiation into the natural world. Here are painful losses along with pranks of exploding cigar boxes and numerous scientific experiments (the most hilarious involving a duck and distilled spirits). We are led finally into the adult profession of science with its intricate and complex language. But the range of these poems and essays is always human —as teacher, experimenter. spokesperson, guide, his focus always takes us into the heart of the matter.”
–Jeff Daniel Marion, Jack E. Reese Writer in Residence, University of Tennessee Libraries
Knoxville, TN
“Art Stewart has written a powerful, deeply personal collection of poems and essays that link his keen eye and deep affection for nature to universal milestones in human life. The death of a father, the reactions and recollections of family, and the hope and tenderness displayed in instructing new generations, are all captured in this volume. As a poet-scientist, Stewart uses his unique insight to celebrate the cycles of humans, and our chemical constituents that weave and separate in the dance of life.”
–Professor Mary E. Power, Department of Integrative Biology, University of California, Berkeley, CA
“Your work is every bit as powerful and beautiful a bridge as any of Hokusai’s—I find your intertwining of the poetic and scientific modes just a thrill to step inside of—like any maestro, you make the hard look easy, without disrespecting particulars—Mary’s enthusiasm for your work is now mine as well.”
–Jane Hirshfield, Prize-winning Poet, Translator, and Essayist
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Excerpts
THREE WEEKS LATER
Three weeks later I begin
tonguing the hole
in me left
by the dad‘s death
like a tooth pulled
the delicate edge
soft tissue torn
tender under the tip
of the tongue
do not
press hard
at first
for no good reason
it still hurts.
CIRCLE, TURTLE, ASHES
While deploying the ashes of the father at his homestead site in what
is now the Indiana Dunes National Park, May, 2009
1.
the ashes went down
from the plastic bag in the cardboard box
in a circle I walked
on the homestead site ten,
maybe twelve, feet
in diameter. Each of us
took time, putting him home
on the grass, the weeds, the beautiful
wild flowers
and a young
pin cherry tree
a few paces from the large cedar
I planted two feet tall
as a child forty-eight years ago
and I said
nothing
at all
as the ashes went down
in the circle but just
before that, the youngest
of us, James,
discovered and brought forth
a great box turtle: perfect
in his shell with the trap-door shut
the precision dome of the shell
tessellated and heavy in the hand and if
reincarnation is a fact
that was him.
2.
While deploying the ashes I open myself
to consider their elemental composition: calcium,
chlorine, strontium, potassium,
magnesium, iron, sodium, phosphorus
in an insoluble form probably, some
bromine, a little zinc I think
and the butterfly weed with its perfect
orange flowers of life now
should be OK too with the taste of alkali
recycling into the sand with the next rain.
3.
We walked at a good clip the mile
from the homestead site to the shore
of Lake Michigan passing
along the way a fine swamp with skunk cabbage
bursting its lovely
stink to the air and cattails
from which a redwing blackbird sang
and wild dunes, and even a place
where a forest fire had passed through
years ago you could tell from the dark
skeletons of the trees, up and down
a few hills until
we were there:
the water on the far
side of a windswept beach of singing sand
one whitetail deer
getting a drink, eyeing us
before turning and casually
leaping for higher ground and we
walked along the beach at the water‘s edge
east to west, a few
gulls nearby, the boys
among us skipping flat stones across the rippling
surface of the water, no large waves, looking
now and then for fragments of crinoid fossils, the stacks
in Gary evident across the water west
and we sprinkled his ashes there, too, at the water‘s edge,
letting him know
and us, it was OK, he was home.
LADOGA LAKE AND NYOS Nominated for 2010 Pushcart Prize
1.
Ladoga Lake is cold
six months a year,
two hundred thirty
meters deep, all black water
trembling and running loose under waves
and back in autumn of 1942 at night
nothing howled: just the wind
working around basaltic rock on shore.
Leningrad lay in siege
under the German thumb
nine hundred bitter days
and nights and when Ladoga
that winter froze
under the hard glitter of ice
deep enough, it bore trucks
and souls
starving for freedom
and a crust of bread.
Women stood in chill houses overlooking
the lake, breathing frost, thin
trickles of smoke rising, burning the last
sticks of furniture to cook
leather shoes and wall-paper paste
to a weak soup
trying to sustain life.
At night
Ladoga became the lake of life,
ice moaning and snapping like shots.
A truck or two, fed petrol from a brittle can
wrapped in a rag
enough to muffle it
in darkness, everyone listening
for the stuttering drone of German planes
drawing closer.
2.
Forty-four and a half years later,
far to the south, in Cameroon –
Lake Nyos: tropical, sullen
creature like a chameleon
motionless but feeding nonetheless
in silence on volcanic gases
deep in its basin, with the water
trembling as though it knew
just the right time, the perfect thing
for death, before breathing out
a flood of carbon dioxide, killing
one thousand seven hundred
souls sleeping
or walking about in villages
dreaming in life.
3.
A lake
giving life to the dying by freezing –
a lake
breathing death to the living –
nothing in the classical limnology course
I took years ago prepared me for this.
Now my devotion
to life and to lakes in these times
of neither good nor evil, I say
to my students,
this is your duty – listen
to each technical thought with the heart: feel it
tremble like water
END OF A CIRCLE
The end of a circle
is its beginning; its beginning, its end.
We are closed, we are open; we give
and receive.
We are the ash
formed as the forest roars
in a great conflagration, giving up life.
We are the flames leaping
at night from one dark mountain to the next,
or the flames eating
coal from the earth set afire.
We are dust: the silent sprinkle
of shattered meteors and comets
burning and skipping the high air hard.
We will become
a body used up, cooled from life,
burned or buried in the earth or at sea.
We will be recycled, released from the tight
carbon-to-carbon bonds tying us
now to life.
We will be set free by death to become
nutrients for plants soaking up
sunlight, making food
that sustains more life –
bacteria, springtails, earthworms,
even the turtle: yes,
raise your wise old head
in praise.