Remembering Stuart Bartow
Kristen Lindquist
And Happen
A couple of years ago at Haiku Circle—a gathering of poets that recently ended its 15-year run in western Massachusetts—Stuart Bartow came up to me tenderly cupping a dead bird in his hands, hoping I could identify it. That reverence for the natural world, paired with an active, questioning wonder, shines throughout his haibun, which sing with birds, lightning bugs, butterflies, and stars.
In the haibun “All of It,” he states what might have been an essential revelation of his life: “When I was a boy I liked being alone. Often I would go out at night and gaze up at the stars … It took a long time to dawn on me that whatever is out there, just like everything here, is related, distantly or not.” We are all made of stars.
In “Calliope,” he finds a kindred spirit in a swallow that flies under a moving vehicle and emerges unharmed: “My heart went with that bird. I, too, have made mad dashes…”
In “Winter Birds,” he wishes birds for us all, forever. “It’s a fact,” the haibun begins, “but not too hard, this death we must all embrace. What I want seems too much to ask: For others, in a future winter, to find that the birds are here…” After lovingly listing all the usual winter birds, he concludes:
…That’s what I want, for it all to happen. And happen
once hidden
through the bare trees now
old nests
And in one of his most moving and masterful haibun, “Migration,” Stu references geese in a way that breaks your heart. Here it is in its entirety:
My sister’s body, overdosed on heroin, had been found in an abandoned house. A couple days after the funeral I was driving my 15-year-old niece to her friend’s house when she asked if I thought her mother would go to hell. No, I replied, she’ll go to heaven, but she’ll have to stand in line for a long time.
a wobbling V of geese
flying
in the wrong direction
The geese, birds, become emissaries of sorts, carrying us away. Where do the dead go when they are gone? After Stu’s passing, his partner, Barbara Unger, found tucked inside a book this haiku, scrawled on a scrap of paper:
geese flying off
into the fog
taking me with them
We often look up when we speak of the dead. It seems especially appropriate that when I think of Stu now, I think of the sky: a night sky full of fireflies and stars, a sky with birds, with passing geese.
About the Author
Kristen Lindquist is a frequent book reviewer for Frogpond, among other journals, and coordinator for the Haiku Foundation’s Touchstone Award for Haibun. Her books include island (2023, Red Moon Press) and It Always Comes Back, winner of the 2020 Snapshot Press eChapbook Award. You can read her daily haiku blog at kristenlindquist.com/blog. She lives in Midcoast Maine.