poet stephen page

The Salty River Bleeds by Stephen Page

By g emil reutter

Stephen Page provides the reader a look into an unfamiliar life in this fictional account of life on the ranch. He tells us in The Legend of Wood:

We all have our stories to tell.

The weak and the strong, the rich

And the poor, the old and the young.

Which story do you have to tell, and

From which point-of-view do you wish to person?

Page has a poetic story to tell. He captures the beauty of nature, violence of the ranch, love of a spouse and of course his muse. These beautiful images are from the first two stanzas of this poem:

Muse in Different Forms:

I see you walking through Wood,

though your image is ephemeral:

yellow eyes and blood-blonde hair,

linen robe and leather sandals dissolve

as I enter the tree line then solve as suns.

One day as Teresa and I drive through

Santa Ana’s gates, we see Old Man

shimmering upon the dirt road wearing

a tattered coat, and as we approach him

his unshaven face and he disappear.

Here we have the beautiful muse, ephemeral, linen robe and dissolving leather sandals, of the old man shimmering upon the dirt road. Simply beautiful writing.

In the poem Fauna he captures the beauty of nature in the third and fifth stanza with fresh images of rosemary, sough of Delphi’s cloud, bumblebee with red clover tongue and Artemis with sunburnt face and parched lips:

Rosemary outside my matera window

Scents the sough of Delphi’s cloud

Buzzed northerly by the bumblebee

Brandishing his long red clover tongue.

And never touching barefoot Delos

Artemis leaned over fresh cut grass

With sunburnt face and parchment lips.

Page does not shy away from the violence of the ranch as in the excerpt from Cattle Rustler:

In the shade of the trees next to the chute

you glared at us and unsheathed

your silver facón and sharpened it,

then shaved a calf’s hindquarter

looking for the brand

you knew was not there.

You were calm and meticulous in your shaving

but when Notary whispered to Advisor

that that calf and the other ten

were much fatter than the other calves on the ranch

you jerked your hand,

slicing the calf’s flank, cutting off

any denial.

He captures the calmness of the shade tree coupled with impending violence of the silver facón, the cutting of the meat of the innocent in a calm and meticulous manner. Yet, here it is without any denial. He returns to nature in the first stanza of the poem, Satellites:

The tree frogs called the rain last night,

but the rain did not answer.

The intermittent croaking, about

every hour or so, was followed by

a gust of wind and the scent

of water, but no sprinkle, no pour.

The image of tree frogs calling the rain is not one we think of often, but a rancher might. Yet there was no rain, just a gust of wind and scent of water. Hope for rejuvenation.

In this collection, Page captures ranch life and the woodlands that surround the ranch. In the midst of nature, man’s violence, of rustlers, tattler’s, of gaucho’s he writes of the queen of his kingdom in this beautiful poem:

Teresa: Translator

You are the translator of my day.

I fall into your graphite eyes

When we transmute,

I find your hands

The hands of a maker:

Soft and crafting.

I want to caress the curve

Of your lip,

Speak to your breasts.

Become my left ear

And I shall remain my right—

Where we meet we will middle.

The spider feasts

In the web of my thoughts,

And pastures modern

The corners of your culture—

Remove the weeds

Of your socialization.

Idiom me,

Invite me into the woods of your words,

Seat me at your banquet table.

You are the coffee of my mornings,

The mate of my afternoons.

Why do you hide your syllables

Under your tongue?

Don’t you ever question

The power of words,

The meaning of sleep?

Yes, I know you do,

In nightmares—

And in this I second your revival.

The grass grows at night,

And in the heat of mosquitoes,

So let the windflowers grow.

Language me inside Wood,

Ranch me where the city

Has not yet encroached.

Marsh me where the ranch cannot reach.

You are the queen of my kingdom,

That I have so temporally created.

You are the singer of my verse.

Interpret my dreams.

The Salty River Bleeds is a collection of poetry built in harsh realism, myth, nature and love. Page is a master of his surroundings as he is a rancher. His powerful use of images blended with the reality of ranch life marinates throughout the collection. Get the book, you will be better for it.

You can find the book here: The Salty River Bleeds by Stephen Page – Finishing Line Press

g emil reutter is a writer of stories and poems. His latest release is: Stale Bread and Coffee

New Release from Poet Stephen Page

salty

Congratulations to North of Oxford contributor Stephen Page on the release of his new book, The Salty River Bleeds !

The Salty River Bleeds by Stephen Page

Praise for The Salty River Bleeds

The Salty River Bleeds is a juicy tale in verse that draws us into the teeming world of a large Argentinian ranch. This world is populated by herds of horses and cows, nefarious ranch hands, foxes, bees, bats, parrots, carnivorous ants, Andean flamingoes, cattle rustlers, horse thieves, to name but a few of its many denizens. The narrative reveals the complicated web of woes in the life of a land manager, the tyranny of weather patterns, and one man’s battle against the encroachment of pesticides. In this world, nature’s staggering beauty and naked brutality are constantly in evidence. A stallion “learns the phases of grass.” Trucks struggle through “the butter of mud.” Cows can explode with bloat, and rain that the narrator prays will be called down from the sky by the croaking of tree frogs can make or break you. As its title suggests, The Salty River Bleeds is packed with the drama of birth, death and eternal conflict.

–Amy Gerstler, author of Bitter Angel

The Salty River Bleeds is ambitious in its scope and its execution, with a relevance to contemporary environmental issues. Stephen Page deftly combines poetry, prose, and letters…and relies on highly refined, compressed imagistic language and strong character development to tell his tale.

–Jim Daniels, author of Places Everyone

The Salty River Bleeds is a continuation of the story of Jonathan and Teresa that Stephen Page began in A Ranch Bordering the Salty River. These poems speak of the visceral life of farming on a fictional ranch in Argentina. Page’s narrative is a journey of perseverance through a physical and psychological wilderness where loveliness and brutality abide together. Here, the likes of a raw and wet “afterbirth slopped into a steamy pile” leads to the mother straining to “stare at her calf until breath raised its ribs.” Page walks us through vulture-ravaged carcasses into pastures and wood and marsh; walks us into the solace of bees, mockingbirds and “a flock of black ibis” that “lift/and cloud away.” This is poetry told with an unflinching, yet reverent eye.

–Carolyn Welch, author of The Garden of Fragile Beings

The Salty River Bleeds is equal parts parable and fable, examining humankind’s destructive and self-defeating tendencies, particularly with regard to caring for the land human beings and animals rely on. Here where the Salty River bleeds, you will find that Myth swims, Old Man lingers on your peripheral vision only to disappear, and Black Dog follows you into the mythic Wood. On the ranch, you will encounter Tattler, Excuse Maker, and Bad Guy, archetypal figures standing in for all those whose motives are to be questioned. By turns imaginative and inventive, gritty and grisly, gorgeous and ephemeral, this is a book that will linger long after you have finished. There are inherent truths laid bare here that we would all do well to pay heed.

–Cati Porter, author of Seven Floors Up

In Stephen Page’s The Salty River Bleeds, the spiritual journey of Jonathan continues from A Ranch Bordering the Salty River. Looking for a story to explain his life, Jonathan meditates on nature, in particular Wood, a place of testing, a place of mysteries ripe to be discovered, and the people who work his land without reverence. With an observant eye for detail, Page brings together striking images of the elements of earth and human life that become both obstacles to and medium through which the speaker of these poems understands his world.

–Caroline Malone, author of Dark Roots

Stephen Page’s The Salty River Bleeds is a pastoral and violent account of ranch life. His poetic collection blends agricultural and rustic contention with eco-rural insight and directness. His delivery is candid and un-floral, thus bestowing the music of his perception an energy of seized quotidian acuity. These poems dare the readers to care about the animals, the daily activities of surviving rurally, and the grammar of the land exploited by genetic modified commerce and industrialization. The work invites the geography of natural breeding life to marry the perennial charm of ranch hardship. There, in his work, exists the sensual preservation of humanity, but also diurnal desires. Page’s bucolic poems “may take you to an unlit alley at night” or “sound like buckets of water being poured on the corrugated roof.” Regardless of the rustic tempo his work imbues you, through Page’s percipient, omniscient eyes, we see and hear everything he observes and feels and yearns. Like sheep hides “salted in the transit room” – Page’s work is designed to ambush us, not with the forcefulness or melancholy of existence, but, as seen here, with the authoritative authenticity of his persistent fervor.

–Vi Khi Nao, author of Fish in Exile

Stephen Page’s The Salty River Bleeds is a collection of connections. Page explores relationships, ethics, and economy through environmental images that ooze the intricacies of farm life. His thoughtful, sensory-rich prose and varied expressions of poetic form delve into the inner workings of losses and discoveries.

–Savannah Slone, Author of Hearing the Underwater

Stephen Page is a true poetic chronicler of the complex business of ranching, that mythic journey. The Salty River Bleeds is iconic storytelling; a hybrid of poems, letters, and prose. Filled with rich images, “wood walks” and myth finding. “Life takes you into some unplanned territory.” Follow Page and we are “wading into wheat” and “working all week to save the corn.” The tractor is broken, the fences need mending, but still we are watching and waiting for Old Man walking by the side of the road, the one who never stops. Follow Page into his dreamscape of visceral reality to satisfy a curiosity, an unspoken desire.

–Elaine Fletcher Chapman, author of Hunger for Salt

In The Salty River Bleeds, Stephen Page poetically and unapologetically reveals the real, harsh truths of running a ranch in Argentina. Johnathan’s daily stressors, created by unreliable employees, weather, and Teresa’s greedy son, Damien, find us anxiously watching him “run across pastures with my sword / Raised, looking for someone to decapitate.” Page softens Johnathan’s persona by peppering the pages with love, beauty, mate, and the whimsy of Wood and Myth as “A wooddove pops / its wings as it departs eucalypti mist auraed by / a vanilla sunrise.” The juxtaposition of the hard and the soft leaves us with a longing to know how Jonathan and Teresa’s story ends. The Fauna of this collection proves to be a mesmerizing sequel to the Flora of the initial introduction of Johnathan and Teresa in his earlier collection, A Ranch Bordering the Salty River.

–Laurie Higi, author of The Universe of Little Beaver Lake

The Salty River Bleeds by Stephen Page

Remembering Mary Oliver

maryoliver

By Stephen Page

Oliver as Nature

This afternoon, I am rereading Mary Oliver’s American Primitive for the sixth time. I first opened the book yesterday, and every time I reopen it, the poems make me forget the reason I am reading the book. I am supposed to be looking for an interesting topic to write an essay about. Each time I get a thread of an idea on what to write, the poems carry me to the place the narrator is, climbing a tree, eating blackberries, standing by a pond, watching a bobcat walk by, feeling large snowflakes land on my upturned face and melt on my cheeks. I am immersed in the poems. Being of quick mind, it took me only six readings of the book to understand why. This is Oliver’s intent. She immerses the reader into the poems by immersing herself into the narrator who immerses herself into the subject she is observing.

The poem ‘White Night’ is a prime example of what I am speaking about:

All night

I float

in the shallow ponds

while the moon wanders

burning,

bone white,

among the milky stems.

Once

I saw her hand reach. . .

the muskrat

will glide with another

into their castle

of weeds . . .

I want to flow out

across the mother

of all waters,

I want to lose myself . . .

You see how the narrator and the muskrat are similar in place, viewpoint, and action? They are congruous. Similarly, the second party, “her”, corresponds to the fourth party, “another.” This “her” is possibly a lover of Oliver’s, and “another” is a mate of the muskrat, but if you take into consideration that Oliver starts the poem with “I,” and not “We,” I am guessing “her” is the transition-being of the narrator to the muskrat. A morph. At the end of the poem the speaker is the muskrat.

Similar transformations happen throughout the collection, in fact, almost in every poem—though Oliver is talented enough to make each transition unique. Sometimes she writes mirror poems—for example, the bear poems. In one she is observing a bear climbing a tree, finding a honeybee nest, enjoying the taste of the honey and so elated by the sweetness he is ready to fly like a bee. In a sequential poem, the narrator is the bear, climbing the tree, having paws, eating bees that are in the way of her raid of the golden syrup, and then she too has the fantasy to fly.

Of course, success at having the reader become the subject via the narrator via the writer is due solely to the talent of Mary Oliver. Her lush language immerses the reader into the subject by stimulating all of the senses. Only an adroit writer can pull this off. Most writers resort to didactic-ism and over-explanation—Oliver simply shows, she never tells.

American Primitive has myriad themes that could be discussed in depth, but my theory is that Oliver was trying to convey one main idea—that is, that every living thing on this earth is connected. She shows this in several ways: one, the morphing; two, by having subjects who die, or pass on, return to the earth or to the sea; three, the title, which along with several poems in the collection infers that the people who were living on the continent of America before Europeans arrived some five hundred years ago were in tune with the natural world—this is an indirect way of saying that the people who recently populated America are not so in tune.

Stephen Page is the Author of The Timbre of Sand, Still Dandelions, and A Ranch Bordering the Salty River. He holds two AA’s from Palomar College, a BA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Bennington College. He also attended Broward College. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant. He loves his wife, reading, travel, family, and friends.

https://smpages.wordpress.com

Ally, aka Advisor Resigns by Stephen Page

Ally, aka Advisor Resigns

You have exchanged the blue coat we gave you

For a red one; or is it just reversible?

Don’t snarl at me, you are not a lion,

You have the eyes of a glass serpent.

You taught me how to be a Godfather,

Not a father, or a leader.

You taught me how to destroy land,

Not build a ranch, or a reputation.

You think only in percentages,

Yours of course, not ours.

It’s no wonder you stink of cancer,

You are rotting from the inside out.

Don’t project yourself into me,

I am not your lost pocket mirror.

You shaped yourself through self-debasement,

But I will not lose my edification.

You will never spark cognitive dissonance,

For consensus on your chagrin.

You weighed the cows wrong, admit it,

Your florid three names will not save you now.

Trenchant are the ineligible, who wish

For nothing more than what they work for.

Your resignation was up for reprisal,

But only half-heartedly.

In the end you have saved me,

You have engendered my independence.

You are like a senator who asks a general

To win a war, then banishes him.

Empirically I have judged you

From the throne of my office.

Stop whispering in my ear,

I will not listen anymore.

I would like to name you Rasputin,

Except, you did not succeed.

Stephen Page is the Author of The Timbre of Sand, Still Dandelions, and A Ranch Bordering the Salty River. He holds two AA’s from Palomar College, a BA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Bennington College. He also attended Broward College. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant. He loves his wife, reading, travel, family, and friends.

https://smpages.wordpress.com

Teresa: Translator by Stephen Page

woods

Teresa: Translator

You are the translator of my day.

I fall into your graphite eyes

When we transmute,

I find your hands

The hands of a maker:

Soft and crafting.

I want to caress the curve

Of your lip,

Speak to your breasts.

Become my left ear

And I shall remain my right—

Where we meet we will middle.

The spider feasts

In the web of my thoughts,

And pastures modern

The corners of your culture—

Remove the weeds

Of your socialization.

Idiom me,

Invite me into the woods of your words,

Seat me at your banquet table.

You are the coffee of my mornings,

The mate of my afternoons.

Why do you hide your syllables

Under your tongue?

Don’t you ever question

The power of words,

The meaning of sleep?

Yes, I know you do,

In nightmares—

And in this I second your revival.

The grass grows at night,

And in the heat of mosquitoes,

So let the windflowers grow,

Language me into the wood.

Ranch me where the city

Has not yet encroached.

Marsh me where the ranch cannot reach.

You are the queen of my kingdom,

That I have so temporally created.

You are the singer of my verse.

Interpret my dreams.

Stephen Page is the Author of The Timbre of Sand, Still Dandelions, and A Ranch Bordering the Salty River. He holds two AA’s from Palomar College, a BA from Columbia University, and an MFA from Bennington College. He also attended Broward College. He is the recipient of The Jess Cloud Memorial Prize, a Writer-in-Residence from the Montana Artists Refuge, a Full Fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, an Imagination Grant from Cleveland State University, and an Arvon Foundation Ltd. Grant. He loves his wife, reading, travel, family, and friends. https://smpages.wordpress.com/

The Lasater Philosophy of Cattle Ranching

Lasater Philosopy of Ranching by Laurence M Lasater cover photo

By Stephen Page

Laurence M. Lasater’s The Lasater Philosophy of Cattle Ranching is progressive and full of common sense. Old cattle ranching methods are becoming extinct or decimating the ranchers. Just few examples of Lasater’s new ideas are: selecting cows and bulls by size and productive characteristics, not just coat color; keeping animals only if they are productive (examples, if a bull is not working or a cow aborts, sell the animals, don’t wait for next year as they are just eating grass that could be used for productive animals); and don’t use whips, cattle prods or screams to move animals, in open range just move behind them on your horse, and in the corral use a white flag on a pole (they will move forward)—this stresses less stress the animals, reduces the possibility of them injuring themselves or an employee, and they are easier to handle. If they are on the way to the butcher, calm animals are higher in weight and have better quality meat—animals when stressed hours before they are butchered have tougher, darker colored meat, that is why sometimes you will see cuts in a butcher shop that are almost black (not always because the meat is old or exposed to air, but often because the animal was stressed out before it reached the butcher. I read the book as research for my poem project and to improve myself as a rancher.

You can find the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Lasater-philosophy-cattle-raising/dp/087404037X/ref=la_B001JOU556_1_2_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1513899850&sr=1-2

A Boat Full of Seagulls: 10 Poems and Tangos – Translated from the Spanish by Stephen Page

Stephen Page and Muse

Poet Stephen Page recently had this collection published at National Translation Month. Here is the link to the pdf file : http://nationaltranslationmonth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Stephen-Page-Spanish.pdf

Fauna by Stephen Page

Photograph by g emil reutter

Fauna

Fauna is absent from the wood of late,

I cannot see her from my treestump—

She has lit to trees and burrowed underground

Escaping the face of four-legged Helios.

Cynthia came to me in my tower—

She wore a diadem and sheer short robe

And while I lay naked on my carpet

She straddled me with her sandaled calves.

Rosemary outside my matera window

Scents the sough of Delphi’s cloud

Buzzed northerly by the bumblebee

Brandishing his long red clover tongue.

Diana was once a lover of mine

That flew with me to California

And shotgunned in my rusty Volkswagen

But did not vacate my New York studio.

After four long years of living with Helen

And never touching barefoot Delos

Artemis leaned over fresh cut grass

With sunburnt face and parchment lips.