Third Place Winner, December 2005 InterBoard Poetry Competition

Poetry

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Poetry

InterBoard Poetry Competition

Third Place Winner, December 2005

RAIN
after “Storms” by Philip Levine
John Vick
(Inside the Writer’s Studio)

At a still damp picnic table,
after the letter arrived and
anger eloped with the sense of
justice that came on me like a high
wind of relief and left me pensive,
after those went by, I daydreamed
and he sat next to me, in haute
couture and size 8 embroidered Turkish
slippers. I knew he was an apparition
of my conscience. He said he
understood me. My avoidance of
the horrible truth of his illness.
We were in a park near a cemetery
established some decades ago, with
huge oaks and elms heavily dotting
the slopes of monuments; death markers.
I had never been there before. For years
I’d wanted to speak to him; give him
a call on a lonely Friday night. His silver-
blues stared into my browns and I thought
of our heavy coupling years back.
It, of course, had begun to rain, so I
walked as he slipped away into
transparency. I walked among the
college’s libraries, the city parks,
the outdoor malls, through the farmers’
market, not seeing him again. When
bars began asking cover charges
and the streets filled with hooligans,
I walked to Uptown and home, meditative,
plume I was oddly relieved. And above,
the sky purple-black, was not filled with
stars, the city lights restrictive, but a couple
of planets showed through.
From what was visible of the Milky Way
I’d swear I saw the slippers dancing.

Judge Ravi Shankar’s comments: “The strength of this piece is consistency of voice, the parable-like collusion of narrative with mystery. An apparition of the speaker’s consciousness is given brief embodiment and like an excerpt from the Arabic classic Alf Laylah wa Laylah (The Thousand and One Nights) we have a jinn appear in a speaker’s mind with a Rilkean message (perhaps to change one’s life) then dematerialize into the curve of outer cosmos that envelops the night. There’s a suppressed joy as well as a growing anxiety being released in this piece and while parts of this might work better less as conjecture (I daydreamed, I thought) than as the veracity of certain visions, the poem still depicts a diurnal mood with uniqueness and precision.”