November 2017
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
As I write this in mid-October, fall has arrived for good in northern New England, with the usual dry, crisp air, the usual changing colors in the trees and, as usual, the reminder of what is compelling about this season of the year, the long, slanting light that carries us from hectic summer into winter’s silence.  Soon the “leaf peepers” will arrive in big buses from points south and next weekend a very large crowd of runners will show up for the Mount Desert Island Marathon.  Then we who live on Maine’s Atlantic islands will stiffen up for the winds that dominate our lives until spring.

The King’s Truck

        She sat listening, and then announced assuredly,
        “the King is here, … The King says it’s time to go”…
                                                              -Belden Lane, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

In the room of the old woman
whose mind has taken paths
too tangled to follow
Rosie the cat
disappears.
“Rosie, where are you”
she asks, then
“can you hear the truck?”
Whose truck we wonder
hearing nothing but
Rosie’s loud purr, the sighing
of spruce boughs in the falling snow.
“It’s the King,” she says, “he
has come to take me home.”
We want to ask where home is,
knowing we cannot know,
but Rosie, who has
no trouble on strange paths,
whose ears catch the sound
of life beneath the snow, reappears,
leaping into her lap,
determined not to miss the ride
that she and the old woman
hear idling outside.




The Kingdom

I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed.
                                                                                                                 -1 Corinthians 15.51.
We drove for hours in the rain.
When the sun came out we found
a stretch of median like a pasture
sloping toward the eastbound lanes,
the grass recovering from a recent mowing.
We defied the odds, pulled off,
knowing whatever city
we were bound for could wait.
In a clump of scrub pine
we ate our bread, drank a little wine
while traffic flowed around us
like an ocean breathing like
surf on the shores of a kingdom where
the pieces of a broken marriage
are picked up, and no one cries
in the room where someone’s legs
grow yellow in the last
stage of cancer, no one
stares at the rug,
in the arctic whiteness of despair.
We bagged our litter,
leaned against the fender for a while
then started the engine, kingdom-bound
in that moment, in the twinkling of an eye,
in the flash of chrome from a tractor-trailer
rolling into Scranton.





Crocuses


When some night in the dark
of a theater perhaps
or sitting on the porch
after the mosquitos
have dropped asleep in the grass,
the woman next to you asks
the name of those flowers,
the first ones that come up in spring
and you tell her crocuses –
at that moment it all
comes together, everything
you’ve heard about the moment,
time present being present with all
time, and you think you
always knew but never quite
made it to the present,
the eternal now the mystics
think they have nailed down.
But the question brings to mind –
to two minds, actually –
the name of a tiny flower and
with no sense of time
but with perfect timing it
springs from dried tubers
here on the porch or,
as I said, a dark theater.
©2017 Ralph Skip Stevens
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