“Art in the Air” Poetry Contest
Winners—January 2002
Theme: Earth
First Prize: $100, Leonard Kress,
Perrysburg, OH
Orphics: The Descent
Finding the entrance is easy, any farmboy
shooting rabbits will sooner or later step
on ground that gives. There’s no trick, just keep
going down the jagged slope. Enjoy
descent for its own sake, the narrow pass
that hasn’t shifted since death himself took over,
ages ago, the cushion of mud that covers
your tracks. No one above suspects trampled grass.
You must do it alone. The only treachery
comes from hanging rocks and unseen refuse,
harder than stone, left by other lovers.
The river is so pure, you might confuse
it with her song, or soul, or other rivers
that flow between your words and what they signify.
Second Prize: $50, Christine Delea,
Tualatin, OR
Cycles
Tops spinning out of control, spiraling
On the newly waxed kitchen floor planet-
Like. The carousel full of music or
Dark soapy water sucking down the drain.
How many circles fill us everyday,
Perfect “O,” concentric force and cheese wheels.
In math class, or the car turning on ice
On a clear blue winter morning, the grand-
Father clock face in the hallway, ashtray,
The mouth in surprise, pre-kiss. The wheels on
The bus, and we’re taken back to child-
Hood yards, short arms outstretched, wild, dizzy
Cycles, inevitable fall to earth,
A rotating oval too big to grasp.
Honorable Mention: Sharron Singleton,
Southfield, MI
The Plow
still stands at the edge of the field,
abandoned, rusty, as if the farmer
had just walked away for a moment,
wiped his sweaty brow,
gone to the house for water.
It has waited here some 40 years.
You’ve seen them too, plows, balers,
cultivators, harrows, like carcasses
of extinct animals, grain growing wild
up and through the ribs—gray
farmhouse, a wounded elephant,
down on its knees.
Could the farmer have known when
he walked away the plow would
never move again? Did he look over
his shoulder at the sun glinting
from his metal beast, at furrows of black
earth narrowing to a distant point?
Was there an agricultural rapture,
old farmers in overalls suddenly
hoisted out of their tractors, a wife
stirring a pot, her body
so tuned to his, she feels a tug
at the base of her spine too?
Everything ends—burdock and bindweed
choke out wheat and alfalfa,
silos fall through space one stone at a time,
but in honeyed late-summer light,
praise this plow, its curved blades like talons,
clinging more and more tightly to earth.
Honorable Mention: Rex Richards, St.
Clair Shores, MI
09/11/01
Silence,
then sudden inrush
of breath
when the world
came down.
I raged, wanted
to scrape
the terror-made
burst
of sunflowers
off my TV screen.
Outside,
the sun-filled
red maple, its leaves
of blood, wept
burnt mist
into its shadow;
the morningglory
wound itself
doloroso
around its stays
of string.
A crow,
his own smudge dark
in the sudden
world, clamored
against the broad blue
torment
of sky, his language
of shock & hurt
the struggle too,
to push back
Earth’s terrible
drift & spin.
Honorable Mention: Henrietta
Bensussen, Fort Bragg, CA
The Path to Home
Follow a path traced
into the forest, outside
the fences and edges of fields,
a place thick with shadow,
not still, not busy
but full and dense, tall
with pines, red-bark cedars
furrowed trunks of firs.
You must watch each one:
oak, alder, birch. They move
by centimeters over the years
deep into a territory
of rock, clay, their own dead
they sew themselves into
with knuckled fingers,
fibrous thread. The forest
expands beyond what you see.
Breathe with it. Your lungs
become rich and green
as spring leaves, your blood
as sweet as maple sap.
Stretch your rough arms
for the hermit thrush
to perch on. Listen
to its song, and sing
its notes to the wind,
for now you are inside
and the path to home
is gone.
Honorable Mention: Leigh Fairey
Forrest, Maple City, MI
Roots
They visited from Pakistan
and a country in Africa that has changed names several times since.
My grandparents smelled of silk, and some spice found in curry.
Letters were sent to Karachi, then Dacca and Addis Ababa.
We repeated these words that laughed on our tongues like exotic colors.
While Grandfather engineered foreign governments,
Grandmother ordered servants around, shrewdly
bartered in outdoor markets and painted her toenails red.
My parents stayed home, grounded in the challenge of chemistry,
teachers’ meetings, and five little kids.
We listened to their foreign language of formulas and experiments.
They smelled of Benzene, ditto machine ink
and rows of children’s shoes.
Many years later I found my own scent by burrowing
in the dirt. It is earth and rosemary, earth and
basil, earth and lavender.
Ordinary ground becomes the exhilarating smell of the world.
I crush the green leaves in my fingers and inhale the markets
of Bangladesh.
