INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
Paul B Roth
Duane Locke
Alan Britt
Silvia Scheibli
Steve Barfield
Duane Locke
Alex Ferde
Kristina Krumova
Richard Gartee
Lyn Lifshin
Gale Acuff
Alicia Mathias
Sunday Eyitayo Michael
Running Cub
Laszlo Slomovits
Shutta Crum
Solomon Musa Haruna
Elisavietta Ritchie
Yuan Hongri
Helen Grigya
Fahredin Shehu
Karyn M. Bruce
Michael Lee Johnson
Keith Moul
Jennifer Burd
John Grey
Rekha Valliaypan
Fred Wolven
Ann Arbor Review
is an independent
International Journal & ezine
Copyright (c) 2019 Francis Ferde
All rights revert back to each poet.
--editor / Southeastern Florida
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AAR history note: in print 1967 - 1980. Irregular publications 1980 - 2004. As ezine 2004 - present. Most of 51 years all together....
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staff:
Francis Ferde
Silver Grey Fox
Running Cub
Fred Wolven
Submissions via e-mail:
Wandering into a Saginaw
Cemetery that Autumn Afternoon In Michigan
With An Old Poet Looking for a Greenhouse In Which to Write His Poems
we searched for Roethke's
grave all afternoon,
you needing to sift through dirt and overgrowth
to enter, somehow, his greenhouse hermitage
that place where his large, cumbersome hands
potted the black, wet wombs,
forcing tiny shoots up from their darkness.
I watched you bend down
to brush away one leaf, then another,
moving as a shadow across these weather-worn markers
like one of the small creatures that hunk of a man
so delicately mused into a poem.
I could not have known then or understood
how roots appear, then wisps almost invisible,
pushing, pulling, yet each moment a painful struggle
a rhythm so close to death
one dare not breathe too closely, too far away.
I remained distanced
watching you, wandering through words and phrases
each year offering some small piece of a cutting, a poem
for this man who waltzed his way across a greenhouse floor
and gave back life to that which might have never survived if untended.
And I, who can now feel, the veins of small stems
suck water from autumn rain, bulge up and over thick, hardened dirt,
wonder if you still search old notebooks for poems
once saved, as Roethke there, nudging roots and nubs.
After your passing, I visited the house where, as a child,
Roethke fought abandonment and loss, an alcoholic father and an uncle
who committed suicide. The greenhouse, too, has disappeared,
but I I step carefully on that piece of ground where it once stood, a sacred
place
where remnants of his voice permeate the grass and flowers, where he once
stood,
where I stand, breathing in this Michigan air.
I kneel and fill a small bag with soil, hoping to touch a word or phrase
in this brown earth, knowing, as he knew, nothing gives up life.
Karyn M. Bruce, Biscayne Park, Florida