https://www.albany.edu/offcourse
http://offcourse.org
ISSN 1556-4975
New Poems, by Oliver Rice .
BILLIARD BALLS, THE TASTE OF BLOOD
The deep reader,
on his second coffee,
the Saturday sun glistening,
turns the last page of a fundamental book,tenuously possessed of good health,
functional versions of the cosmos,
the truths of Earth
and humanity as a species thereon,
a judgemental interpretation of his psyche,
a neural system alert to consequence ---but disquieted by a yearning, an onus
to act upon the impelling profusion of reality,chihuahuas,
billiard balls,
pill boxes,
wooden shoes,
entities without figurative reach,
skeet guns,
filing cards,germination,
effervescence,
plumage,
the taste of blood,
phenomena in which he is no factor,
cloudbursts,
sounds of a rain forest.
IN A SKIFF UPRIVER FROM VICKSBURG
Listen to the geese and the warblers
on their flyway to northern mating grounds,
inheritors of millennia of witness to Earth,
to dinosaurs, mastadons,
and all of anthropology.Listen to the ducks and the thrushes,
programmed to navigate by the sun,
the magnetic fields, and maps in their heads,
to compensate for wind drift,
for acts of the gods and civilization.Listen to the hawks and the mockingbirds.
Suppose they might have an intelligence
as unique as extraterrestrials
and dialects as articulate as Rama or Job.
Listen for the Roc and the Thunderbird.
KARBACHER ALONG THE FOOTPATHS OF HIS NATIVE SCENE
This, he says, gesturing to all we can see,
this is where my father and his and his,
by their pursuits or flights,
arranged for me to enter the world,to absorb the idiom of these lifeways
without criteria or context or mistrust,
pointing to the house that was always home.These same, he says, to come to the point,
are the willful streets,
the traffic of human types,
among which began the dissenting voice
of the Presence, my Intending Ego,at first occasional, unremarked,
in due course persistent, companionate,and where I am yet a work in progress.
Bio notes: Oliver Rice has received the Theodore Roethke Prize and has been nominated twice for a Pushcart prize. His poems have appeared widely in journals and anthologies in the U.S.A. as well as in Canada, England, Austria, Turkey and India. His book of poems, "On Consenting to Be a Man", has been introduced by Cyberwit, a diversified publishing house in the cultural capital of Allahabad, India. It is available in Amazon.com.
His poem "Of Frank Lloyd Wright" appeared in Offcourse Issue #36.