All posts by Steven Schroeder

I am a poet and visual artist who has spent many years moonlighting as a philosophy professor – most often in interdisciplinary settings, most recently at the University of Chicago Graham School. I studied at the University of Chicago (where I received my Ph.D. in Ethics and Society) and Valparaiso University (where I received my B.A. in Psychology). I grew up on the High Plains in the Texas Panhandle, and that is where I first learned to take nothing seriously. Emptiness plays an important role in both my poetry and my painting: I often find myself spending as much time on what is not there as on what is. This usually means focusing on a single image and letting the whole composition spring up around it – not a narrative but an all at once that evokes a here and now that is, here, now, neither. A likely story is likely to grow out of this when readers and viewers encounter it, but I hope my art always invites more than it contains. stevenschroeder.org
poetry

a promise

Winter falls fast as
the road rises. Slow
sun has been setting
the scene for hours.

Prairie grass bows south
through barbed wire. Yellow
alone does not suffice to
describe it in this light.

It is the north wind lying
cold across the plains in the stems
kneeling, the color of ice deep inside
dry grass long before the road ices.

It is a promise, the real presence
of what is to come. And when I stop
and turn, as everything turns,
the moon, full, is what it is,

what it has been, where it will be, where it has
been from the beginning, pure cold light rising.

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poetry

assuming (not knowing)

It is the middle of the day on this
busy Hong Kong street. Every collision
is inexplicable. It seems the whole
mass of the people is moving to one
end while every other person stands still.
Temperature rises as pressure rises
as long as the volume of whatever
contains us is constant. From collision
to collision, I am a molecule
in a fluid assuming (not knowing)
the shape of the vessel that contains it,
water making its way down to the sea,
the smallest possible constituent part
lost in thought, the river, still, moving.

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poetry

seeing is believing

it’s like yo’ eyesight like yo’ eyes says
a guy walking the other way, and I
know he is not talking to me but I
have not yet disentangled conversation
from the physical proximity of bodies
and I find myself thinking nothing
I know is like your eyes
                                               someone shouts something
I cannot understand from a passing car and I know
it is nothing personal but it pierces my dreaming
and I am still trying to make it out when I pass a guy
in a hazmat suit fishing under the Clarence Darrow
Memorial Bridge while birds I can not identify
occupy high-rise houses made for purple martins
with their voices
                                a tiny yellow bird pursues
a brown one four times his size that does not think
to turn which gives me one more reason
to wonder what would happen if
                                                              still,
it is plain to see there is nothing
like your eyes and no reason
to try to make out what anyone is
saying when everyone is talking
to someone who is not here
                                                     you
see what I’m saying?

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poetry

the bridge fades

Not the solid
of a local truth
globally imposed

you desire.
No ground
to take in some

pitched battle
against forces
of the evil

of your choosing. Rain
you might catch now and then
on your tongue

if you put the umbrella away.
Surprising how sweet
the world tastes falling

on a day so gray
the bridge fades
before it reaches the other side

and you have
nothing to walk on
but water.

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poetry

zazen

sitting meditation in a river
flowing fast, Buddha still
smiles. they say

cross the river
by feeling the stones,
but on this busy street it is

a matter of minding
the gaps. no way
but between

to dwell a moment on
this cloud of incense, still, sitting

Macao, March 2013

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poetry

cultivating qi

i learn by negation
how to breathe,
positions made unavoidable
by a city dancing between
qigong in the square
below Starbucks
and traffic that will not stop.

the proper stance is
flowing from there
to here, knowing

when to swerve.
a matter of collisions
a matter of avoiding
collisions — not

knowing, bodies falling.

Shenzhen, March 2013

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poetry

for now

Φόβος οὐκ ἔστιν ἐν τῇ ἀγάπῃ, ἀλλ’ ἡ τελεία ἀγάπη ἔξω βάλλει τὸν φόβον…
       1 John 4:18

Squills and daffodils
spill over barricades
of law-abiding flowers

until lawns with signs
that warn they have been
treated sweep them under a rug

and huddle behind iron fences
with locked gates. Mosque
exchanges glances

with the BP station
on the corner, a long
discourse concerning

corporate personhood
contained in the silence
between them. Christ

the King (a madrasa
in another tongue), not
a mile away, listens.

Fences begin to sway
where Muddy Waters lived,
and the sidewalk is a mosaic

of broken glass glittering
in sun. Most cardinals
stick to the score,

but song sparrows have been
jamming since sunrise. Spring
cannot contain itself, and when

a young guy strolls by miles later
on Wabash strumming a guitar,
I suppose less than perfect

love will suffice
for now.

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