STEPHEN LEWANDOWSKI






MEETING THE BEAR



At night
bears flow
like some dark
force
through the trees
they turn logs
and stones
to lick up food
their thick fur
absorbs starlight
to become bear-shaped
black holes

One slips down from
a weedy road bank
and without a look
enters the field
illuminated by my car
soaking up
every ounce of light-
for a moment
there is no car
no driver
no time
no road
no bear
now we breathe
deep and travel on

Steve Lewandowski, native of upper NY State fields & lakes has worked all his adult life in the professional and private world of environmental activism. His poems have appeared for decades in the small press forest of magazines, journals, chapbooks and books, which are now being somewhat chided as old-hat by those who live with only the screen, but in time much will become missed and want to be embraced....just ask the vinyl record hunters of today.
Hang onto and buy those thin wafer poetry books.

KEITH WILSON










EVENSONG


It is evening again.
My son and his son
sit on the patio, a breeze
catches my grandson's blonde hair,
his father's darkly intense face
leans over his seven-year-old tranquility.

I, a shadow, soon to vanish
watch, hear their voices
as water flowing over
mountain stones or light
caught just before dusk
by surprise, all is held
here in the closing darkness.

— for Kevin & Jeremiah

A bow to one of the enduring poets of the American southwest. Keith Wilson published books with Kayak, Sumac, Clark City, Grove and with many small presses, including Longhouse, where we've drawn this poem from "Life Drawings". Long may he run.