Three Poems
by Richard Stimac
Split, Croatia
My grandpa and uncle took me to Split,
their first family heritage trip abroad.
After the coast, we went inland, to Brod-
na-Kupi, ate lamb roasted on a spit,
dipped pogacha in rendered fat. We’d sit,
sip slivovitz, til both old men would nod
to sleep. At that age, I didn’t know how odd
those two together was. The casting pit
of the foundry cleaved them. My grandpa stayed
union. His brother took a foreman’s role.
For years, they never spoke, at the KC,
sat at opposing ends of the bar, and paid
their bitter debt, failed to reckon the toll.
Now, old, sick, they let their resentment be
Cairo
When I passed Thebes, I prayed my pilgrimage
to Cairo purged my soul, and I would sink,
like dissolved sand, into the ancient river
that wore away the banks of fields of grain,
wetlands, and hamlets with homes raised on stilts
in Illinois’ uneven southern tip.
But all I found were taverns with slot machines,
church-windows boarded with plywood, and charred
Victorian homes of once rich boatmen.
A week of rain led the floods to rush the walls
of earth and concrete that surrounds the town.
Walls keep out floods, not its metaphor, time.
I expected history to greet me,
guide me through times of flat-keeled riverboats
with gambles, New Orleans musicians, priests
and prostitutes. There were also two lynchings.
White and black, each. There’s a photo online.
Dickens used Cairo as an ideal hell.
The past is foreign land with its own myths,
folktales, lore, scriptures to unknown gods
we imagine we can take as our own.
I did meet history, poor, rural, sad,
not colorful, like movies, where it’s clean,
fun, and safe, the violence, choreographed.
At the end of the day, my soul did sink,
as if rotting driftwood ripped through its bottom,
and currents pulled it to the mud below.
My Winter Guest (Who Left Too Soon)
This Midwest winter is a thoughtless guest.
I brood, and wait, until it leaves.
In bed, its cold shoulder makes me sick, stressed,
and, though always tired, I can’t seem to rest,
up all night with a stuffed nose, dry heaves.
Stomach flu should make me hate it, you’d think.
But with a mood that’s damp and gray,
I fill my rocks glass with a triple drink.
Like Sanctus bells, the ice cubes go clink, clink.
Whiskey’s the only way I pray.
But, for me, spring is so much like the fall.
Days and nights, pretty much the same.
Brown grass and soft mud compose a soiled pall,
a metaphor overworked and banal.
I can’t call it another name.
Short days, long nights gift me a certain gladness.
Spring brightness is too much to bare.
The rising sun brings its own divine madness,
then bare trees, beheaded blooms, and sadness
that, with greed, I refuse to share.