I love the way almost every line in Stu Kestenbaum’s “Song of Ascents” suggests something about the nature of artistic process. Don’t we, when it’s going well, feel like we’re on a peak? But there’s that rickety aluminum ladder, and the times it feels like we’re trying to make beauty and form with flimsy tools—a pen, a brush, ourselves . . . And doesn’t it shake us when we feel something profound, something beyond us, take hold? Maybe we age a little with each thing we make, or at least in the moment find our experience enriched. Always the tension between height and depth, and it seems that whatever we’re making, we don’t know how to make the next new thing. Kestenbaum gives us this rich meditation with a beautifully light and deft touch. I won’t forget the speaker leaning against the wall so white paint seems to turn his hair gray. And there’s also his delightfully sly nod to the sense of spirituality in the creative process.
In “The Journal” he suggests another aspect of process, the elements that are less chosen and more deeply associated with dream states underneath our rational consciousness. This is the part of the process in which we are open and trusting, letting “the pages fill themselves quietly.” It’s where mercy lives and “visits us from time to time,” so we can continue to trust the process and the value of our work.
Betsy Sholl, MAJ Poetry editor
Stuart Kestenbaum served as Maine’s Poet Laureate from 2016–21. He’s the author of six books of poetry and last year he and visual artist Susan Webster published A Quiet Book: Collaborations in Writing and Visual Art (Brynmorgen Press).
Song of Ascents
On those beautiful blue sky and cumulus days
I would climb up the ladder to the peaks
of an old farmhouse in upstate New York
to scrape, prime, and paint the peeling clapboards.
The owner wanted the cheapest way out
using college students to make his barn
born again. It seemed an easy enough way
to make a few thousand dollars in the summer,
until I discovered on my first ascent up
the aluminum rungs that the heights
were higher than I could have imagined,
the bent coat hanger hook
holding my gallon of paint shaking
along with me. It wasn’t full-on fear, but
it shook me enough that I would sometimes
lean my head against the building
just to settle myself down,
so that by the end of the day
my dark brown hair was white on the sides,
as if I’d aged with the job. Maybe I had,
having no idea what work was, and no
skill to carry it out. Then, as now, it felt
like the world was falling apart, tearing
at the seams, and there I was, hoping a new
coat of paint could make something better.
Spending days high up in the air was like
the dreams where you might find yourself
falling through the sky waiting to hit the ground,
my feet pressing the rungs, suspended
between heaven and earth.
The Journal
All night the pages of my notebook
filled themselves with ideas that floated
from the other side, that place where
our aches have gone away. That place
where children live without fear.
The pages filled themselves quietly,
like the gentlest of snowfalls, like that
brief interlude when blossoms
drop from the apple tree. This isn’t
to say that the world can’t be terrifying
but that mercy must live somewhere
and visit us from time to time.
Image at top: Stuart Kestenbaum, Ascent, photograph.