Sitting on a Radiator in South Minneapolis

I came across this poem the other day and it made me realize just how long I’ve struggled with SAD. When I say struggle, it’s not even that I mind the dive downward. Though it’s tough, I also sort of like the slowness. The toughest part is being up and chipper and outgoing around other people when the soul-lights dim. This poem from a few years ago described something I did, oh, about 30 years ago when I lived in south Minneapolis and rented the upper floor of an old four-square. I didn’t know what to call my yearly dive then, but, looking back, I can see that I learned to cope in creative ways.

The old house had a long hallway with a window at one end, facing west. A few weeks after the spring equinox, when the Sun had passed far enough north to shine in that window, the rays hit a radiator on the other side of the living room. I painted that radiator to greet the Sun each year, and to hold its glow deep inside when the Sun was gone.

My own little Stonehenge.

Photo by John Forson on Unsplash

Sitting on a Radiator in South Minneapolis

A radiator squats at the far end
of a narrow hall. One fall,
I painted the outside
quick December dusk
and slow Coltrane blue.
Deep inside the fins:
tangerines, fresh carrots,
and a summer Saturday morning.
All winter the radiator
clanked and hissed.
In early April
the afternoon sun slid
through the hall window,
and for six days,
as it continued its trek
across the sky,
the sun struck
a match to the radiator:
it glowed with the warmth
of new light.
For a moment
each sunlit day
I climbed atop and crouched
like a turkey vulture
in the spring sun,
trying to understand
how something so
precisely predicted,
each year could arrive
so out of the blue.

– Steve Peterson

Left Behind

Have you ever gone into the house of someone who has recently died? Their life lays out there before you. The profound. The mundane. A jumble of unfinished business.

Photo by Scott Umstattd on Unsplash

Left Behind

What do you leave behind
when you die? Strange,
little things, once
beneath notice, stand still
as if the blur of this life
was, say, paused by the
TV remote you had placed near
the newspaper crossword puzzle,
partly completed.

A tube of toothpaste
lies by the bathroom sink,
squeezed and rolled
neatly from the bottom.
How did I not know this
about you? The collection
of Gorilla Tape in the
drawer? So many colors!
Neat files of bills labeled
in your last shaky handwriting.
My own desk is a mess. Toothpaste
crumpled, its top lost. A hole
in my heart. What do you
leave behind when
you die?

– Steve Peterson

To Make the Crooked Straight

For the want of a nail…Creative Commons License Jim « JP » Hansen via Compfight

The last few days I’ve been visiting the family cabin in the north woods. A small place with an outdoor privy, it was built from local tamarack and spruce logs in the late 1940s. While it isn’t fancy, it is filled with all sorts of memories of my extended family. Here’s a poem about my grandfather that tries to be about more than a can of old nails.

To Make the Crooked Straight

On a rusty metal shelf
that stood on the dirt floor
of the shed behind the house:
three rusted Arco cans
filled with bent nails
pulled from a thousand used boards,
and, also, with hope —
to save the unsavory
to make the crooked straight
once again.

– Steve Peterson

Small-Town Illinois Boy, 1974

Via Unsplash

Small-Town Illinois Boy, 1974

Some time it was,
it was a time of
muggy summer nights,
a yellow-moon that shone
through the corn-haze, past the
pulsing cicadas. Alice Cooper
yowled from the window
of a Mustang that crept
under the arching elms.
The red glow of a cigarette.
A tobacco threat exhaled
through the window into
the thickening air.
These bad boys of summer
are old and gray. Their
swagger sags. From the porch
couch, they watch the world pass by,
wondering if the kids will
finally call, or if they should
just pop another beer and be
done with it for the
rest of the evening.

– Steve Peterson