By: Robert Stewart
You Stand and Knock
The mockingbird churched up in the holly bush against the wall at my door crackles at the constant comings and goings, the footfalls and follies of
hours borrowed,
spent, lost, and found. You stub your foe, it seems, with threats of sweeping calamity. You wing it; open booked, spine straining: ‘mene, mene, tekel, parsin’. If it is meaning you aim at I cannot divine it. You profit, then, in the threat – hemming me in between the door and the wall. The wait
nestles down on me like too much time hunched up
in a scrap of precariously shelved parchment. Hovering, in our own ways, we are left to wonder if,
indeed,
this is what eternity feels like.
The Westward Gable
Above the stream pointing skyward
the byer’s westward gable
wanted whitewashed.
Steps would be needed
to broach the gap.
So, her brittle brain and bones
conspired a plan
from the stirring of lime
to the stirruped ladder.
Unsteady the method and mix,
lassoing this job
remained highly unlikely.
Solid, stout, silent, the outhouse
stood
its granite presence
unmoved
by time.
Its paling skin like falling flags of surrender.
Sloppily, she fielded her pale
in the shadow of the seeming immutable.
Snakelike, the wash dripped onto the grass
into water below the first rung.
Pulled long by the weight,
foot
over
foot
over
foot.
Ridge-shy and short of the apex,
Angelo, she reached long with her dripping yard-brush
soothing, scratching, the sclerotic stone.
Panting eyelevel at the top rung
humming some hymn-tune about hills ‘far far away’.
Above the stream pointing downward
pulled back by the weight,
foot
under
foot
under
foot.
Body, bucket, and brush, scrapes and falls,
legs and arms, laddered bone against stone;
by the Babbling brook
the fall
clearly wrung out.
Unsteady,
diverting the stream;
solid, silent, stout, for a
moment
she lay still.
Flung to the bank, her shattered white staff
a marker for what is soon to come.
Spirit over bone, over flesh,
up over the riverbank.
Handling the pain
in the levered rise and fall
of air and water,
sloppily, she bathes her bruised skin
filmed in a thin lather
at the yard pump.
Slapping soaked swaddling
on her bleeding bending arm
false faith welled up
in false healing.
Ridge-shy and short of the apex
memory now hoists up the woman’s
power and presence.
Flesh faced bone like rock immovable.
My grandmother:
scraped,
scratched,
soothed
by the stretching phantom arm
of the bristling past.
And her still singing some song
about a hill
‘far far away’.
A Bloodied Hand
Grounded on the best textual authority after millennia of practice,
the move was executed with aplomb: pilgrim progress, belted tight in the Bedford van,
pinches the Coshquin checkpoint.
Triggered. Pulled into the sordid vortex, caught in adultery. It needed to be cut out, cut off, cut away, cut back,
the money shot. Live streamed, blood trickles slow down,
hard-kicked, and the engine warms his groin and skin.
Stiff barrelled he bulls to the Isle pub to humbly cheer on the sideline,
as if in prayer
(football, it turns out, is more important than life).
Ordered, she holds out her trembling hand to a flash of stern steel coming down
hard,
ejaculating ecstasy, body parts fly.
An out of spirit experience.
You fixate on a bloodied hand hoisted low
that still moves, gesticulates,
as if writing,
as if waving,
in the air,
in the sand,
still writing,
still turning over an olden age.
Still.Grounded on the best textual authority after millennia of practice,
the move was executed with aplomb: pilgrim progress, belted tight in the Bedford van,
pinches the Coshquin checkpoint.
Triggered. Pulled into the sordid vortex, caught in adultery. It needed to be cut out, cut off, cut away, cut back,
the money shot. Live streamed, blood trickles slow down,
hard-kicked, and the engine warms his groin and skin.
Stiff barrelled he bulls to the Isle pub to humbly cheer on the sideline,
as if in prayer
(football, it turns out, is more important than life).
Ordered, she holds out her trembling hand to a flash of stern steel coming down
hard,
ejaculating ecstasy, body parts fly.
An out of spirit experience.
You fixate on a bloodied hand hoisted low
that still moves, gesticulates,
as if writing,
as if waving,
in the air,
in the sand,
still writing,
still turning over an olden age.
Still.
Published author who has lived and traveled in a variety of places near and far. Currently lives in Virginia, USA.