March 2018
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
Note: As I suppose is true for most poets I find ideas in all kinds of places and under a variety of circumstances.  William Stafford talks about receptivity and being willing to accept whatever occurs when one sits down to write.  I sat down one day and the first thing came from the sight of the paneling in my kitchen which gave me “Brown Wainscoting.”  “Arctic” as meaning “bear” came from a book by John McPhee.  The occurrence(s) that led to the sweater pill poem are clear from the poem itself.

The Brown Wainscoting  
​
in my kitchen is
cypress from the south, here
on an island at latitude 44 north.
The schooners, so my neighbors tell me,
carried salt cod to southern markets,
returned with cypress
to become the woodwork in our
plain Downeast houses.
What occurred to me
when that paneling caught my eye
was not the schooner trade but color,
brown, the color of my brother’s
eyes, brown so dark they were
almost black and that is where
my thoughts now go
to that brother whose eyes were
dark and yet bright at the same time.
But I cannot reproduce for you
the look in those eyes so I will
tell you that it is early dawn here
on this island in latitude 44 north
where the houses are full of
brown cypress and where
we are in for another
windy November day.





Memento Mori

 
If I were looking for a way
to picture my mortality it would not
be this snow now general across
the island, falling slowly in great
flakes to shroud the spruce that stretch
from my back yard to the ocean.  And
it wouldn’t be the disappearance of
sunlight behind the mountains, the
tearing of the sky from primary
blue and red to black.  No, I
would choose this old sweater
that sheds little pills of wool
as I walk around the house, leaving
a pill trail from the dishwasher across
the dining room and up the stairs, a spot
of sweater skin on every other tread.
It keeps me company on the journey
of getting older, getting thinner and less
able to keep out the cold even as it
marks the return track, waypoints
showing where I’ve been, the steps from
fear to joy, love to loneliness and
back again.  But we’re not
going back.  We’re pressing on
and it doesn’t matter which of us
gets there first, which skin finally
sloughs off completely, my
natural exterior or this sweater and after all
the wool was once the coat of sheep
living I don’t know where
and knowing little of the end
of their own woolly journeys.
 




The Arctic
Arctic: from Middle English artik, from Latin arcticus, from Greek arktikos,
from arktos bear, Ursa Major, north; akin to Latin ursus bear, Sanskrit ṛkṣa
                                                                                            -Merriam Webster
 
How is it that the grizzly cub
is born out of the warm tide
of its mother’s blood,
the roar of her heart,
into the silence
of the stars?
I was in the room
when my cubs were born
into the shock of a bright
warm incubating space
but in the Arctic
the bear’s new body jumps
from the darkness of the womb to the icy
brilliance of northern constellations,
to the pounding mountains,
salmon-crowded rivers,
to a light with no walls
to hide it.
©2019 Ralph Skip Stevens
Editor's Note:  If this poem(s) moves you please consider writing to the author (email address above) to tell him or her. You might say what it is about the poem that moves you. Writing to the author is the beginning of community at Verse Virtual. It is very important. -FF