WE ARE YOU PROJECT
Bio: Silvia Scheibli
Silvia Scheibli’s first book of poems, Silent Feet on Boarded Fountains, was published in 1969, thanks to Duane Locke, editor of the Poetry Review published by the University of Tampa in Tampa, Florida. Graduating Cum Laude from the University of Tampa in the late sixties, she was one of the founders of the Immanentist movement along with Alan Britt, Paul Roth and Steve Barfield. Since then she has published eight books of poetry including: Silk Angels, The Moon Rises in the Rattlesnake's Mouth, A Desert Storm and Under the Loquat Tree. She is the publisher of CypressBooks and Cypress Review, a magazine of contemporary poetry founded in 1979.
In the introduction of Under the Loquat Tree, Paul Roth, editor of The Bitter Oleander Press, states that, "What occurs is that Scheibli’s poems transport us inside the things on this earth we do see, that our intellect does comprehend, but has never really drawn on as needed in developing our relationship, whatever it is, with the infinite." Joyce Metzger in her book review of Under the Loquat Tree says that "Scheibli’s words resound with a mystical love, an understanding, a melding into naturalness, and then coalesce with all of life through love."
(Photo by Carolyn Johnstone)
In the summer of 2003, Silvia Scheibli’s poems were translated into Spanish and included in La Adelfa Amarga, an anthology edited by Miguel Angel Zapata and published in Lima, Peru. Other anthologies include: Internal Weather: New Poems, New Poets, edited by Fred Wolven; Mantras, an Anthology of Immanentist poetry edited by Alan Britt; New Generation: Poetry, edited by Fred Worlven; The Immanentist Anthology, Art of the Superconscious, published by The Smith; Southwest, a Contemporary Anthology, edited by Karl and Jane Kopp.
Besides anthologies her poems consistently appeared in magazines such as, The Bitter Oleander, Black Moon: Poetry of Imagination, The Midwest Quarterly, The Raw Seed Review and Ann Arbor Review.
Silvia Scheibli lives in Arizona close to the Mexican border where she taught English to bilingual high school students. She began writing when she was eight years old. She wrote letters to her father who had moved to Toronto, Canada from Hamburg, Germany.
THE BORDER
We did not cross the border,
The border crossed us.
---Dolores Huerta
I gaze river-like
Looking for a river
or even some tree ducks
But there is only this endless
Late afternoon freight train,
rumbling through the intersection.
Brakes squealing.
Rolling to a stop.
On my left Mesquite bushes
crouch
float up the clearing
and melt
In between cracks of boxcars.
Moving again,
Dim amber lights flicker
& jolt
On the track.
River-like
I scan the empty road.
(© Silvia Scheibli 2012)
EN EL DIA DE LOS MUERTOS -
Nogales, Sonora.
Death
Sat on a chair
At Pancho Villa’s Bar,
Sipping
Cappucino kisses.
Guests nodded
In her direction, as
Passers-by quickened
Their steps.
En el Dia de los Muertos
In a low-cut gown
Death
Was content
At Pancho’s.
(© Silvia Scheibli 2012)
FLIGHT ACROSS THE US BORDER
There was a black butterfly.
She saw it.
Right away, she saw it.
She begged her son
Not to cry.
To be still.
To hide it.
Under his tongue.
But she saw it immediately –
Fiery
Red ants carried it off.
(© Silvia Scheibli 2012)
WE ARE YOU
In the sidewalk crack shaped like a mini helicopter
a piece of greasy paper, trash from the roach coach
is stuck to the dried up dandelion.
The corner of the paper points
to the neon sign above the sunburnt roach coach
which opens its shutters at 6:45 am at this corner of the street,
gathering place for workers who wait for
white pickup trucks to slow down and park.
Like at the viewing of a still life
when the fruit bowl or flower bouquet is too quickly noted,
workers and drivers silently take in the scene. Daily the same scene,
the same still life. Only identities shift.
(© Silvia Scheibli 2012)
IN THE TIME OF THE JAGUAR
In the time of the jaguar and
the Sky Island Alliance
there was no border fence yet.
Macho B,
as the jaguar was called,
never knew his scientific name.
His thick, twitching tail wrapped
blue-shaped darkness
over his muscular shoulders.
There was no border fence.
He knew the invisible, good-night bird
roosting in jade brush
by luminous, golden eyes,
like his own.
There was no border fence.
He watched the jagged flight of fruit bats
sliding out of the moon’s sleeves
to chrome-sapphire blossoms.
There was no border fence
so he crossed the busy frontier
along the Santa Cruz River
through a lavish sunflower tunnel
into Arizona.
Until one day Macho B
walked right into the homes of
Tucson residents via the evening news.
It was reported that the Arizona Game and Fish
Department had trapped and euthanized
the only jaguar left in the wild.
Agents apologized many months later,
after a thorough and meaningless investigation,
when the border fence was complete.