“Art in the Air” Poetry Contest Winners Winter 2001
Theme: Animal

First Prize—$100
Shulamith Wechter Caine (2 poems), Cynwyd, PA

Nose to Nose with a Tiger

            After a woodblock print, “Woman Painting a Dragon That Comes to Life,”   Totoya Hokkei (1780-1850)

I am writing about a tiger
when suddenly we are nose to nose.

He rises quietly as smoke,
unexpectedly as winter

blooming of ume in Yokohama.
We stare at each other, unafraid.

I greet him, cool as Stanley
greeted Livingstone,

“A tiger, I presume,” I hear
me say. Then, nimble as thought,

the tiger disappears, trailing
pawprints and the musky scent

of well-watered grasslands.
This reminds me of a Japanese

woodblock print—an artist paints
a dragon on a fan. It is

as if she coats the paper with oil
for the dragon loses his footing,

slips from the pleated surface. He glows
above her head, a fiery halo.

The artist kneels at her task as if
she prays. As for me, I do not

worship any god, but
I have sweated scrubbing floors,

weeding an unruly garden.
When I write, I, too, am on my knees.

First Prize -- second poem
Shulamith Wechter Caine, Cynwyd, PA

Tigers in the Zoo

Even in old age, their bodies are beautiful
and fit together like puzzle pieces.
They flick their tails flirtatiously;
they snap at a persistent fly.
The tigress dozes, crosses her paws
like my grandmother folded her hands on her lap
or laid a brush on the dustpan after
a job well done. The tiger sprawls
beside her, relaxed and spilled as a man
after sex. Two spots above his eyes
are spectacles pushed up and resting
on his forehead. His beard is white,
wispy as a Chinese philosopher’s.

I am like a voyeur spying
on neighbors who never close their blinds.
I wonder what they remember of blue
stars pulsating in the immense
jungle night, what longing holds them
in its bloody jaws.

Second Prize—$50
Mary Ann Wehler, Troy, MI

Pulse

Behind the pills in Mother’s kitchen, a chameleon
stares at me. Two inches nose to tail, he scoots
behind the bottles with nitro, blood and heart pills.
I slide the drugs away from the wall, try to catch
him in a tissue. He darts behind the breadboard,
freezes next to breakfast crumbs. His pulse throbs
through the skin on his back. I pounce again;
he leaps off the counter, lands on the lid of a waste
basket. Mother calls for help with her oxygen. He slips
down to hide on the floor. That night, the beat in my ear,
my own pulse, matches the motor whir
pumping Mother’s air. I fall asleep to dream
green chameleons. Climbing palm trees
curled like phone cords toward the sky.
Heart beats, motor groan, labored breath.

Honorable Mention
Chris Rhein, Brighton, MI

Woodpecker

Again he startles me,
mid-stanza,
words left hanging,
rhythm lost
to his rapid-fire knocks,
a crazy morse code.
I curse this bird
who doesn’t know
house from tree.
Three times this morning
I’ve opened the window,
rattled the blinds,
shouted him away.
He doesn’t understand
his one-note scolds
are not the bones
of poetry.
Not oriole,
all color and song.
He can’t help
his shadow-gray feathers,
his diligent digging.
He’s hungry.
Let him bore
into the wood,
hammer out
o after o after o
in straight little rows
as he hunts for food
he cannot see—
the taste
always a surprise.

Honorable Mention
Barbara Crooker (2 poems), Fogelsville, PA

The Woman Who Called Hawks from the Sky

All summer long, I hear him, his faint call of blood,
though he stays high up, a speck, a mote, a floater.
His hunger sharpens, honed on the strop of the wind.

In October, he floats on the thermals,
halfway between the flamboyant sky
and the gaudy dance of sugar maple, oak leaf, birch.

When the apples ripen, heavy and red, when gravity
begins to call them down, I hear him high above the clouds
crying, “Killer, killer, killer.”

In winter, when water in the bird bath turns to stone,
he comes down in a rush of mottled feathers flame stitched
brown and white, all hooks and curves, talons, beak.

I come to the back door, with my bowl of blood,
chicken scraps, congealed fat, gristle, skin,
leave it as an offering.

When nothing in my life seems predictable or constant,
down he comes, a whistle on the wind, conjured
out of nothing, the great grey ceiling, thin air.

                                    published in Potomac Review

Honorable Mention
Barbara Crooker (2 poems), Fogelsville, PA

The Comet and the Opossum

The opossum that used to live in the thorny tangle
of wild roses is dead this winter; I found his body
as the snow melted, the same March that the Comet Hyakutake
passed us by. I’ve been out these clear nights looking
at its smudgy brightness as it travels across
the constellations, Virgo to Boötes to the Big Dipper
and the little one. Now it’s just west of Cassiopeia,
in Perseus. I try to imagine 20,000 years ago, the last
time it came by, when we were living in skins and caves,
seeing it trail its luminous tail across the known patterns,
the atavistic shiver. When I take my nightly walk, I fix
on the comet around every bend in the road. Each night, it
has moved one notch west. Every day when I walk the dog,
the opossum’s fur has eroded a little more, bone showing
through, the teeth set in a primitive snarl. He came to the
back door one winter, but only one, and ate the scraps
of meat and fat set out for the birds. One night, he curled
up in the wheelbarrow, hissed when we came too close.
Now, he diminishes daily, as insects and weather
do their work, until only a few clumps of fur remain,
and meadow rue and lady’s bedstraw begin to cover the bones.
Last night, looking up at the inky blackness, I felt myself
shrink, smaller than the smallest bones in the opossum’s tail,
and then I found the comet one last time. It seemed to be fixed
in the firmament, a nebulous white light in the western sky,
but was, like this transient world, rapidly drifting away.

                                            published in Karamu

Honorable Mention
Elizabeth Volpe, Bloomfield Hills, MI

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