poetry

Philip Kobylarz

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TINTINABULAR

by Philip Kobylarz 

What is certain are possibilities. The potted weed might bloom. Cloud play might develop
                                   a sunset erratic, colored
 with the dust of the living. Days are to be clung to, lined up, planned as boxes in which
                                   they are encased. Calendar
 squares to be x-ed out because the nights are many and certain. Heart concealed in a hope
                                   chest. Doilies remain
 as fallen cobwebs on a bureau full of old, fading, photographs, narrations for the future.

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author picPhilip Kobylarz is a teacher and writer of fiction, poetry, book reviews, and essays. He has worked as a journalist and film critic for newspapers in Memphis, TN. His work appears in such publications as Paris Review, Poetry, and The Best American Poetry series. The author of a book of poems concerning life in the south of France, he has a collection of short fiction and a book-length essay forthcoming.

Michael Levan

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TO M. AFTER SEEING AGAIN HIS FIRST PICTURE WITH SANTA

by Michael Levan

What was it made you
            stick a fingertip in your mouth,
searchingly, as if you could sweep
            stubborn words off your tongue,
write them in air and answer the man’s
            pepperminted question?
Remembering how I’d wake you to watch
            December’s first snow, our foreheads
burning against living room window’s cold
            as midnight came and you begged to see us
through the morning? What did you,
            star-bright and tongue-tied, want most then?
All I meant was to keep you
            close. All I wanted was to listen
while you whispered what
            could make you happiest.
We walked home from Sears,
            your wool-mittened hand
scratching mine, bare and wind-chapped,
            pulling me under streetlamps’
yellowed ovals, our shadows drawing
            out long and faint, until
one flickered and went blank. An angel,
            you said as you turned to run
and I went cold, high above us
            the shy new moon ghosted.

                                      Nikon 35

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Levan photoMichael Levan’s poems have appeared recently in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, American Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Dialogist, and Heron Tree, as well as Cutbank’s 40th anniversary anthology and Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee. He teaches writing at the University of Saint Francis and lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and son, Atticus.

Michael Levan

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SITTING BY A WATERFALL, I’M REMINDED HOW MUCH MY PRIORITIES HAD SHIFTED

by Michael Levan

I’ve heard this music before:
          white water’s roar over dam’s edge,
                batter of limbs caught between rocks
                       chiseled smaller and smoother each day
                            I’ve been alive, each day after,
                                 until they give way and let everything go
                                       downstream, carried along with fish, all mouth
                                            and rainbow, leaping from now clear water

All the water that came with such power
    and so suddenly I woke to shut tight my sons’
        windows, the screen door thwacking its jamb,
                 so we might again disappear night into morning.
                     Water that sewers and riverbanks couldn’t keep
                           from basement or our Desoto Wagon’s floorboards,
                                that swallowed slowly every storefront on Main
                                     and we canoed to Kowalski’s Market for loaf
                                of bread, peanut butter, four Cokes to hold
                           fast against all we’d soon lose: Duomatic washer-dryer
                     I’d saved for all year for our anniversary,
                 couch and wooden floors rotted through, everything
        I’d replace with late night and weekend overtime—

It all became such white
   noise when I found on top bedroom shelf,
         far in back, all the letters I wrote a continent away,
             photos and M.’s report cards, R.’s crayoned
                    family portrait where the three of them<
                           smiled under golden sun and crafted a castle
                                  of sand while I looked out over ocean waves
                                     beating lower and lower on the shore,
                           their music receding as water’s always does.

                                                                  Herco Imperial 

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Levan photoMichael Levan’s poems have appeared recently in Indiana Review, Mid-American Review, American Literary Review, Lunch Ticket, Dialogist, and Heron Tree, as well as Cutbank’s 40th anniversary anthology and Southern Poetry Anthology VI: Tennessee. He teaches writing at the University of Saint Francis and lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana, with his wife, Molly, and son, Atticus.

Sean Prentiss

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TENT

by Sean Prentiss

Hours after the sun has set into these dark
Cascade Mountains, hours after we’ve slunk
Off to our scattered & weary tents that sag
From weeks of wilderness living & these
Endless days of rain & snow, I lie in a bag
That reeks of earth & sap & bar oil & listen
To the songs of snow against the vestibule.

I wrap the heat of my bag tight around me,
Wondering how this new crew is holding up
In their cheap bags, wondering if they dream
Of soft pillows, cell phones, & humming
TVs to shepherd them to sleep after another
Cold day in these green mountains of rain.

I don’t blame them their dreams & as I shut
My eyes, I dream to the cold music of snow
& dream tomorrow—or the next—to when
This bearded face may finally experience
The warm rays from that barely rememberable

Sun.

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Sean PrentissSean Prentiss is the co-editor of The Far Edges of the Fourth Genre, an anthology about the craft and philosophy of creative nonfiction. He teaches at Norwich University and lives in northern Vermont.

Seamus Heaney: Tonight He Dines With Yeats

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Seamus Heany
I received this note from our Poetry Editor, Jim Gustafson today on the passing of Seamus Heaney.

Jim wrote:

“This morning I learned that Seamus Heaney died at 74 years old. He was just seven years older than I. He was an important poet to me and to the world, for that matter. I would not have any enthusiasm to argue against those who would say he was our greatest living poet.

News of  his death stirred that something that makes me want to try to write a poem. I thought of his 1995 Nobel Lecture which I occasionally listened to as I walk. In that talk he says, “I credit poetry for making this space-walk possible.” With that in mind, I began to write. I watched my words come out in the slow sentimental drips that come in mourning and thought it best to move-on in prose, where sentimentality is allowed to whisper.

Heaney was never far from the shadow of his father. Like Roethke and others, there is a connection between poet, father, and earth that cannot be shaken. In his book Death of a Naturalist, his poem “Follower” recalls how, as he father plowed the Irish field, he followed behind “tripping, falling and /yapping always.” The poem ends with the lines:

But Today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.

Perhaps I feel close to Seamus Heaney because we share fathers who won’t go away. Perhaps it is our mutual awareness that our fathers’ toil made it possible for us to escape the fields. Whatever it was, he is the sort of poet who enters the room with his words. And in all the days ahead, when we read his poems, he will be behind them. He will not stumble, nor will he go away.”

Well said.