September 2019
Ralph "Skip" Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
Bionote: These poems are in my collection, Things Haven’t Been the Same, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. For me, although different from each other in tone and perspective, they are linked by sharing, in contrasting ways, the idea of the poet.

Prophecy


Of places desolate and void
their minds were full,
those prophets, place
of the owl, land
of whirring wings.
Or so I think, reading late,
the wine still sitting there
untouched. The old dog paces,
claws clicking unsteadily.
My daughter watches him circle,
making his bed, while prophecy
arrives uninvited,
dressed in rags,
asking for my voice.




​
Rumi’s Field
Out beyond ideas of right doing and wrong doing,
there is a field. I will meet you there. -Rumi
                                       
I was standing in the field where Rumi
said he would meet me.
It was late and snowing hard so
I thought the poet might have cancelled
or decided to obey the turnpike warnings
to slow to forty-five and not
crowd the plows.
The flakes were big ones,
dropping slowly, covering
the spruce and fir that fenced us,
me and the field, and I thought about
a picture I saw once of markings
in fresh snow where an owl
had dropped on a field mouse
and left the image of
claws and spread wings.
I began to wonder if
I was in the right field or
he might be here already,
the poet,
just waiting for the
right moment
to drop on me.





Magnetic Resonant Image


This lying here, trapped,
plastic cocoon around my
head jammed between sponge pads
stirs me to action mind
fighting stasis gasp-
ing for intellectual breath
a drowning swimmer
struggling for the surface,
flailing against the knocking hammering
machine gun stuttering
through the ear plugs.
So the plug comes out of
song, poetry, lines from Milton
Shakespeare running breathlessly
with Donne, with Keats, Hardy
Dickinson, Frost to tell the
shadow images now forming
in digital non space that
body lives and moves
and has its being anywhere the
mind can move, can
form a thought, hear
perfect triads, rhyming
couplets, see a resonant
image of
something that flies from
any burst cocoon.
©2019 Ralph Skip Stevens
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