Richard Stimac

Mermet Springs, Illinois

In Little Egypt, near Cairo, Thebes, and Karnak,
Straight along Highway 57 south,
Along the current’s misgiving switchback
Where the river is wider than at the delta’s mouth,
In an old stone pit, we’ve sunk our culture’s wrecks:
A coal car, airplane, pick-up truck, the scrap
And waste of someone’s dreams, life, foregone projects.
Our lives’ ends fit so neat and clear on a map.
I pay to dive, to explore the rust and the grime.
No book, no history gives guide
To my search. I do, as you, breath, breath, in time
See, touch what the cold, lightless waters would hide.
We cast our lives in cold, wide, silent pools
Of fading light. Memory is for fools.

_____

Visiting Mother Jones’s Grave

(Union Miners Cemetery, Mount Olive, Illinois)

Incus clouds change hues: soft coal to hard lead.
Lightning strikes. Furrows flood with summer rain.
Beneath these plains, a cross of empty mines
Supports the country’s heartland. My car whines
Down gravel country roads. The tires throw stones
And shake off dust. And there, a wailing train.
I’ve come to try and honor bygone dead.
They buried Mother Jones in Mount Olive.
A cracked obelisk marks her resting place.
No flowers grace her tomb. She will not rise.
I ache for her faith in progress. But lies,
Here, history, yet unseen, fills this space
Around her grave. “Her boys” no longer live.
None will unearth these wrathful Irish bones.

_____

Demobilized

My dad left part of himself in Viet-
nam. You can see them in a tourist pic:
A foot under a tea house table. A rick-
shaw decorated in red ribbons for Tet
Holds forearms in the spokes. A girl, baguette
A femur’s length under her arm, skips quick-
ly past a begging monk. A snapped chopstick
Gives the finger, angry at unpaid debt.
These are keepsakes no one meant to amass.
The collector of these gems is a fool.
Another father, ARVN, VC, N
VA, amputated names from a time when
Names mattered, sits in the shade on a stool
And counts his own parts scattered in the grass.

______

Poems from “Bricolage” (Spartan Press, 2022)

---