I wrote this poem below during the Farmer’s Market last night in Ely. Whiteside Park is crowded on Tuesdays. There’s plenty of great food, live music from NLAA and according to different folks a sum total of about seventy booths to visit.
We’re now open from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. and it’s a great time to hang out in the park in Ely. I looked back through pictures and poems and discovered that Juliet and I have been doing the Farmer’s Market together for a long time.
Originally, she sold paper mache folk art animals and homemade jewelry and Lucy sold hand tied fly-fishing lures like mice and Dahlberg Divers and frogs for bass and pike fishing. One summer, Juliet sold homemade fudge. As time went on our typewriter collection grew, so did Juliet’s ability and skill to write poetry “on demand.” She got her own typewriter. She clicked and tapped out her own style. She gained her own following, fans and audience.
Now when people step up to the plate in the park at the market to get a poem, they get two, one from each of us and each is One-Of-A-Kind and memorable and very different from the other. I can tell how we are similar in our craft, but not by the end product, solely in the creative process. By now, I know how her writer’s brain works.
I don’t know exactly what this one means. As we’ve no doubt discussed before, that’s part of the point. Like our favorite songs, poems mean different things to different people and that ability to transcend the original idea, theme and whatever personal elements might be unique to the author -- that’s the element of connection that takes art of any kind from personal to universal.
I was thinking of summer, the past, of course, of the unknown future, and of those once inescapable moments that have now, given so much time and space, escaped, like fireflies that slowly winked out in the dark one last time. Try as I might, I cannot recall their details, only their vague shadows. Smells, though, and lines from certain songs, songs from certain albums, grass blown from certain riding mowers, mole tunnels stepped in unawares, these things bring the escapees back within my grasp.
For Real Deep Woods Off smell wet dog summer red rhubarb stalks in the evening. Setting sun. Cut green grass between my toes. Fireflies let out of a jar. Random spaces generated by old typewriter keys.
These are the faults where you can find me in between scents and down old cracks listening for the taste of water right from the hose. Chiggers in the grass. I can hear the summer of 1991 slipping in between us.. My fingers smell like tomato vines and this is how I know that you have left. for real. © 2026, June 9th #elystreetpoet Timothy James Stuffer All rights reserved The lilacs and honeysuckle are in full bloom. There’s a giant bug hatch in the lakes. The blackflies and sandflies are horribly present and the rain has come back to visit. Garage sale season is upon us and the water is almost warm enough for everyone not from Minnesota to swim in.
At night, in the backyard with the cats and David, before I go to bed, I can sit with the breeze for just a moment between bug bites and feel my teenage self wondering what the future will bring. I can remember the sunburn on my shoulders from a cut-off t-shirt and the fringe of jorts against my kneecaps. I can sense the almost hummm of electricity in the air before the storm clouds descend and what it was like to ride my bike for hours without any destination.
If I close my eyes, I can almost see the glint of raccoon kitten eyes peaking out of the old hollow tree where they lay with heads stacked one top of each other waiting for the okay signal from their mother to come out into the world. To explore, to wrestle with their future, to dream about poetry written about them by myself, 50 years later up in Minnesota… Tuesday nights are for real.
