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4 POEMS
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PHILIP DACEY
(www.philipdacey.com) has a new chapbook, MR. FIVE-BY-FIVE, from
Pudding House Publications.
COLUMBUS AVENUE
The sense of self-importance atomizes
in the face of all the faces
on New York streets.
Conundrum: each precious
but multiplied millionly
more precious or less?
It's the faces! said the first-time
visitor. To go to church
on the crowded pavement.
Visual communion.
The host a host of presences.
Whitman walked here, wounded
by the other walkers.
And all the ghost faces
pressing close, at once
draining and promoting
these fiery essences
that scald the tall buildings.
Look where they pass--
in the air behind them,
burn marks.
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THOMAS R. SMITH
His book of seven-line poems, WINTER HOURS, has just been published by Red Dragonfly Press in Red Wing.
THE PRAYING MANTIS
Chin-level with the yard’s low theater,
I watched the green invader, its eyes
luminous and gaseous as suns. It scissored
above the grass’s raised spears, jerky as
a stop-motion model, menaced with
the hanging sickles of its claws, then swiveled
on its turret, vanished in the thistles. . . .
It’s a long time since I’ve looked so deeply
into summer’s screen, though sometimes still I cling
to earth’s breathing fur and taste the sour
wonderment of that fleeting samurai presence,
wait for that tiny monster’s matinee return.
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MALCOLM STUHLMILLER
lives in downtown Minneapolis and on the North Shore of Lake Superior, writing when not working as a trust administrator for a large banking corporation.
A DAY IN THE CEDARS
The little boy fountain
perpetually pees into
an overgrown flower pot,
his trickle splashing the deck.
A soft, effortless sound.
Streams lollygag under the house.
The lake swallows them
and clears its throat.
Squirrels chirp madly
from the forest canopy
in an aerial race
that’s more clatter than show.
Then the thunder,
spontaneous as a swarm
of black-capped chickadees,
as if I didn’t matter
and the world
were dying from the hush.
Soon the gutters heave
like a broken main,
the galloping sky,
the quieted squirrels.
It will rupture the day,
scatter dragonflies,
sputter the hot grill.
But the little boy
with one hand on his hip,
the other on his penis,
never fills the pot.
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CARY WATERMAN
In between keeping the birds feeders full in her St. Paul backyard and teaching writing at Augsburg and Normandale, she finds time to write poems.
FALL SONG
Early morning in the garden,
the sun about to stride around the corner.
Fat bees sip nectar from the Russian Sage.
A bee’s life is one big sweetness
from birth until the moment they are
pushed out of the hive,
useful no longer.
Crow calls in this early light.
He tells what we are all rushing toward.
The king of darkness fell in love
with the girl of summer while she picked
yellow flowers for her mother.
A spider has sent one filament of
body juice down from the fir tree
to the patio table.
She asks:
what’s wrong with the song of melancholy?
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