"Spillway" by Pat Anthony

Songs of Eretz Poetry Review is pleased to present “Spillway” by Pat Anthony.  Anthony lives in the rural Midwest where she finds inspiration in the rugged furrows of the soil and in the faces of the men and women working it. An observer of and warrior for nature and the environment, she uses the land as a lens, and her poems are most often responses to events around her. 

Anthony is the former poetry editor of Potpourri (no longer in print), holds an MA in Humanities Literature from California State University, and was a teacher of English, Spanish, and Special Education until her recent retirement. She has works published or forthcoming in Cholla Needles, Fourth & Sycamore, San Pedro River Review, Snakeskin, and Open Minds Quarterly, among others. Visit her blog at middlecreekcurrents.com.

Spillway

Pat Anthony

From the crumbling stone bridge

the boy in red drops a broken silver

sardine from an invisible line and waits

counts perhaps to ten and then

with only an angler’s patience draws

up the bait concealed within black

crayfish writhing in his fingers as he

tosses it to join others in the cracked

ice cream bucket beside the Coleman.

Poet’s Notes:  This particular poem is like an old Kodak snapshot, the 4 x 4 with wavy edges, the black and white of it. I like to develop the moment so that it reappears in poetry, the starkness its own statement, without interpretation. Sometimes the poems are shot with the panoramic lens; this one, however, was "taken" just over the rail of the old stone Creamery Bridge on the north edge of town. I was struck by the boy's attention to task as the water roiled around him.

Editor’s Note:  This one reads like an old-school Imagist poem--nice, crisp imagery formed with a minimum of words.