Sitting noon on a big stone streamside
hard to sit on
thoughts like waters’
white noise over rocks
Upstream rust
chipmunk scampers
up a log
Across glints a loose, long webthread
a breeze strums
stirred by the broken current
Neither a god nor a deity’s
abode nor living creature
however restless nor a person
as maple, chipmunk, or spider
might imaginably be nor mere
element one with its Tao
Easy, this way,
to let things be
themselves, the mind
open to fill
with something other
than what
windows or margins frame
Easy, for a two-night guest
of the Auberge & Nordic Spa
Beaux R.ves just up the short
well-kept path, a lucky
refugee from the city’s heat,
to think the stream free
of thoughts about it
“. . . in a hammock on the riverside path,
surrounded by the sounds of nature
and the rushing majestic river
with its natural whirlpools . . .”
Neither like language
like air ripples pools
nor a stream of speech
over stone.
Novice, “Sit-close-
beside-the-head,” attend
the song-maker, intent,
the water in the wordless
murmur.
Bryan Sentes is the author of a baker’s dozen of chapbooks and three volumes of poetry. More can be found at bryansentes.com.
Questions and Answers
Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?
Still in high school, I brought some short stories to the then writer-in-residence at my local municipal public library, John Newlove. At one of our meetings, I remarked I didn’t know his work. He reached under his desk to a big box of remaindered copies of his selected poems and handed me one. As I write in another poem: John Newlove the Regina Public Library’s writer-in-residence gave me his Fatman and reading it in the shade on the white picnic table on the patio in our backyard thought “I can do that!” and wrote my first three poems.
As a published writer, what are your tips or words of motivation for the aspiring poet?
“Paw after the ancients” (i.e., learn as much as you possibly can about how human beings have made language into art in all times and places). “Notice what you notice.” In terms of the business of writing, culture the patience, persistence, and insensitivity of a tortoise, but work towards making your own, evergrowing circle.