June 2017
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
My son Ben recently referred to my ability to “channel a poem,” as if the poet were a clairvoyant at some creative writing séance.  But I’m enough of a romantic to believe a poem does have a life of its own beyond this material world, and that the poet’s job is to wait for it, watching with an open mind.  That waiting and watching are hard work, part of which is, as all poets (including the “great Irish poet” alluded to in “Globed Fruit”) know, working through writer’s block.  I happen to consider myself an expert on that subject, with a lot of on-the-job training, so when Firestone announced it as the theme for June I felt obliged to submit the following.

Globed Fruit
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit.               
                                                  -Archibald MacLeish
 
So you’re sitting there
like some great Irish poet
and his automatic writing,
staring into the collective unconscious?
Trying to think of the
what-to-say?
If you’re looking for a theme you
might look for it in vain.
The best have tried,
have watched the tents fold up,
the circus leave town.
Write an essay if you
need to write about something.
Poetry’s this July morning
after a night of thunder, breeze
finding body in the curtains.
And what about the children
bicycling past your house,
hands free, voices
lark-like with the talk of summer, or
the sails you saw yesterday,
white on the horizon?
What of the night after you have
loved wildly, feasted on
wine and scaloppine, after
the dishes are done,
the dog is asleep,
and the moon
has just begun to rise?





Waiting for the Poem


That’s right, it’s
the poem, the one and only,
lying by the BoBo trail,
buried in spruce needles
under the rusting Ford
pickup.  There’s poetry
in the old flathead V-8 or
it could be out there
in the marsh but
watch your step and don’t
let poetry distract you.
You could break a leg in
a clay gully hidden in the grass
between here and the rocks,
where there should be some
solid footing.  But you
stagger in stones that slide back
with each step before you
make it to the top and
the view across Frenchman Bay.
The poem might be out there
blowing in the wind, in
the waves now pouring toward you
determined to push this rock pile higher.
You won’t know until you’re
back at your desk
staring at the blank screen,
fingers frozen on the keys,
waiting.





Writers’ Workshop


The poet says it’s
not his real name.
I listen, but
on the paper something small
starts to move,
a speck of life with no
name I am aware of.
I help it down and
go on listening.
When I look again the
paper is empty and
the table is bare except
there’s a glass where water shimmers.
Someone calls my name.​
“Globed Fruit” was first published, without the opening lines, as “Creative Writing,” in At Bunker Cove, © 2017 by Ralph Stevens
©2017 Ralph Skip Stevens
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