Poetry: Richard Stimac
Murmuration
In Midwest winters, at the early dusk,
starlings give rise to babbling brooks of wings
that wend through skies treeless as open plains.
The birds recircle, eddy, boil, corkscrew
across imaginary beds of rock
clouds white as granite worn smooth to the touch.
No center holds. No shape persists. The flock
expands until it floods over the banks
that bound the gray-lit twilight bottomland.
I close my eyes and hear murmurs of gods
when they flock above me. What do they say,
these synchronized auspices of the divine?
At crest, stretched across the glacial horizons,
the chattering at last settles on fields
of corn stubble beneath a cold full moon.
Silence
The hour before a storm, the birds fall silent
and cluster in trees or along the ground
or roost on rafters of abandoned barns.
That’s how we know, before the sky grows dark,
the putrid scent of coming rain, or hair
that stands on end, we have a squall in hand.
Like this, I imagine our time of death
a hush, the echoes of memory faded,
then lightning, thunder, death rattle, the end.
After the passing clouds, birds sing again.
The air is clean. The neighbor’s children play
in puddles. Oil forms rainbows in the street.
Richard Stimac has published a poetry book Bricolage (Spartan Press), two poetry chapbooks, and one flash fiction chapbook. In his work, Richard explores time and memory through the landscape and humanscape of the St. Louis region.
