Phillip Sterling has 4 published poetry collections: Abeyance (winner of the Frank Cat Press Chapbook Award, 2007), Quatrains (Pudding House 2006),Significant Others (Main Street Rag 2005), and Mutual Shores (New Issues 2000). His fiction, In Which Brief Stories Are Told,was published by Wayne State U. Press (2011). He edited Imported Breads: Literature of Cultural Exchange  (Mammoth 2003) and founded the Literature In Person Reading Series at Ferris State University.

Forecast

The air wears a hint of water
the water a hint of lake

and the lake
in its desire to be more than lake

begins to wear the look
of a person who cannot swim.

Enter a horse
and a saddle of unpretentious

leatherwork
clasp and buckle and cowhide

and the dirt caked on its flank
will turn to mud.

Enter a woman’s hand
ungloved

and the world will fill
with air that hints of water

and the massive head
that turns to her

with soft, curious nostrils.

[Poet Lore 2013]

The Etymology of March

I leave the page
to get closer
to the page
I’m leaving behind

like a word tucked
inside another
and misled by it
Or a piece

of chewing gum
cornered in a poet’s mouth
as he reads aloud
Or these

bright birds
panning for spring
in my neighbor’s eaves
where ice

hangs like a TV crew
over rumors of news
—one thing or another,
particulates,

notes of forage
and refuge.  Here’s
pretext:  masticated
and tasteless

as the lie in belief,
its small cove a brief
unmapped stay
all the way through recovery

[The Cape Rock 2013]

Cycling

You get out the bike your son
left behind.  Something you
haven’t done in years.  Wipe
off the dust.  Pump air into
the tires, which feel chalky
but still seem pliable.  You’re
hopeful.  So you wheel it
to the bike path the township
has paved, the path your taxes
pay for, and you think:  One
never forgets how to ride
a bike (or some other nonsense
meant to buoy your aging
confidence).  But now you can’t
recall the last time you rode
a bike, or even the first time,
for that matter, and as you
consider the idea further, and
with a certain gravity, you
begin to question if you’d ever
ridden a bike at all, for if
you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have
forgotten how.  And yet,
the vocabulary is familiar:
wobble, teeter, swerve, veer …
Don’t your eyes recall a flash
of asphalt?  Can’t your ears
summon a whistle of air?  You
look at the bike beside you, gray
as an elephant, and the color
brings to mind the ballsy
Hannibal, his elephants and Alps
and great assault, and how
when he’d grown tired of it
and could no longer mount
a ride, he took his life.  Ready?

[Baltimore Review 2012]

A Day Like This

A snake could get lost
n a day like this:

coral and ebony,
ringed with white,

morning light sloughed
from clouds of indeterminacy.

As if my breath taken
from your breathing

or landscape leveled
by uncanny wings

and deft vocalizations.
Everything I know

coils beneath the false rock
of everything I’ve known.

[Third Wednesday 2012]