Synkroniciti is excited to welcome poet Richard Stimac of Missouri with two poems reflecting on the patterns of human existence. “Sea is the land’s edge” is a reflection on the Mississippi River flowing through the American Midwest to the Gulf of Mexico. We often romanticize rivers–they still have the aura of the primordial–but they also carry human waste and detritus to the sea, and are vehicles for contamination.
“…the river is filthy/ with industrial waste and fertilizer/ and the undecayed discards that ground/ the street, the house, the frame,/ all the structure of what makes life/ life, as we live it. And so, too, this to the sea.”
This dual nature holds true for time itself, the river of moments that tumble ever on. Humanity pollutes time, but it is also buoyed up by it. How do we continue, knowing the impact (ecological and spiritual) we have upon our environment?
“Ode to Photographs” is a meditation on family photograph albums–all those fading faces that we don’t remember but are our forebears, their proclivities, weaknesses and strengths shaping us.
“Like embalmed bodies, the best kept photographs decay./ Exhumers of bodies were once called resurrection men./ That is how I feel when I take that crate from the shelf// of my mausoleum-like closet and crack the sealed cap./ Light and air flood the disintegrating space./ I disinter the entombed remains of my family.”
It is a bittersweet thing, this family history, daily being lost (we don’t even remember our own past with any accuracy) and yet somehow retained in our bodies, our DNA, the way we approach the world. There are places and things that don’t appear in any photographs, and yet they are clear to us. It is a mystery how memory works.
Stimac writes beautifully with a slow gentle rhythm and alliterative music that feels orational, at times even songlike. One is reminded of Whitman and Eliot at different turns. He has an unusual and unique way of describing and probing things that are all around us, drawing links between the mundane and the numinous. Read his introspective and illuminating poetry in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Richard Stimac lives in the St. Louis, Missouri (USA) area. He 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.