Richard Fein was
a finalist in The 2004 New York Center for Book Arts Chapbook
Competition
A Chapbook of
his poems was published by Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin,
Madison.
He has been
published in many web and print journals such as Cordite, Cortland
Review,
Reed, Southern
Review, Roanoke Review,
Birmingham Poetry Review,
Mississippi Review, Paris/atlantic,
Canadian Dimension, Black Swan Review, Exquisite Corpse, Foliate
Oak, Morpo Review, Ken*Again Oregon East, Southern Humanities
Review, Morpo, Skyline, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary
Review, Small Pond, Kansas Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain
Aroostook Review, Compass Rose, Whiskey Island Review, Oregon East, Bad Penny
Review, Constellations, The Kentucky Review And Many Others.
A TRYST OF EYES
Between us was a
human forest of work-a-day souls
day dreaming
themselves far away from that dark subway tunnel
as they standing
and we sitting rhythmically swayed
to the jolting
of steel wheels on rails.
Between the
buffeting bodies we could see across to each other.
At times I hid
my gaze in the aspirin ad above her.
Her bashful
eyes, in turn,
feigned a study
of all the ads crowned over my head.
But our eyes
betrayed us with our fleeting stares,
which between
86th and Canal street became less and less fleeting.
At Canal the car
almost emptied.
She surrendered
her seat, passed me by,
close, so very
close, almost touching, and then she left.
Yet again we
were eye to eye.
But she was on
the platform, and I was still on the train
with the subway
window in between.
The doors
closed.
Yet through the
window one brazen last exchange,
a deep visual
drinking in, a ravenous beholding,
then the
starting subway severed our tryst forever.
PROPER METAPHOR
Not at all like a
debutant butterfly
cracking open its
chrysalis shell to greet the dawn sun,
while rolling out its
once imprisoned, shriveled wings
like a colorful carpet,
to straighten, to catch the morning breeze,
forgetting its history
of an incessant hunger-driven leaf-grubbing grub,
forgetting its past as a
lumbering larva that day-by-day week-by-week crawled
slowly to its dressing
room pupa to assume the raiment of an angel.
And then it splits apart
its last confinement
leaving all trace of the
infant caterpillar below and behind
in that empty shell
dangling from its last earthbound stem
as it sails away alone
and free, seeking no blossoms to crush
but only flowery
sweetness to sip.
No, not like the
beautiful forgetful-of-its-past butterfly,
but rather more like the
ravenous locust.
Its metamorphosis wholly
incomplete, a plodding progression.
No debutant ball, no
wondrous emergence,
no sudden dazzle of
miraculously unfolding wings.
Rather day-by-day,
week-by-week
the nymph inches along
the very grass it gobbles
in a continuum of relentless growth
punctuated by casting
off of cracked chitin shells.
with each retaining all
the sculptures of the ones before.
Even the sprouting of
wings is predictable
as they grow bud by
bigger bud till that final carapace is chucked.
Then at last fully
formed wings catch the wind.
but all of its rapacious
infancy flies along with it,
for one's infancy is
one's indelible adult companion.
Thus for the collective
we
the proper metaphor is
locusts swarming by the billions
our shape, our very
course through the world chronicles our history
as we devour all the
earth's virgin green Edens.
WHERE AGED, PARK-BENCH-SITTING DENIZENS COME FROM
My dad who
always beat me at handball years ago
sits on a park
bench next to my mom.
Now before me is
a fine-looking old pair,
hand in hand for
forty years,
their faces
golden in the early evening sun.
They ask me to
sit, to talk
for we share so
many common memories.
I'd love to
talk. But my legs are restless.
I need to walk
around the block
a few—no! many
more times
before taking my
place beside them.
~Richard Fein
~Richard Fein
