Jack Stewart was educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University and was a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology.
His first book, No Reason, was published by the Poeima Poetry Series, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The American Literary Review, Image, Crannóg, and others.
Home for the Holiday
A vegetarian, my daughter believes
the roast beef on the platter
is no better
than John the Baptist’s head.
I carve myself a slice.
She has a point, though.
A line of fat
curves like a question mark.
She serves herself
sweet potato casserole, peas,
some knuckles of cauliflower.
We both have bread.
It all comes back to bread.
Feeding four thousand or four,
it all comes back
to the scent that lingers,
the taste that lets the body sleep.
Whatever you are grateful for.
We take our wine with us
when we wash the dishes
and occasionally
raise a toast to each other,
to the words we share.
To the cleared table
now shining
that just a few hours earlier
bore the weight of it all.
Reading the Newspaper
The print smudged my fingers with
The worrisome news of X, but
Rather than events, it is
The ink on my fingertips I
Remember, how reading must be
Washed off but is never really gone,
Is somewhere under your skin
In the blood cells of syllables
That combine into whatever
You breathe, whatever pulses
With such urgency it stains
Every beat of your troubled heart.
Romance of the Cobblestones
Have you ever seen
One by itself,
An individual loaf of stone,
Unweatherstained,
Unfootsmoothed?
These collected imperfections,
These gathered mistakes
That can withstand
Any elements—it takes
A hundred years
To pry one loose.
When the mountains collapse
To their knees,
When millennia let clouds
Slip through their fingers,
These distant relatives
Of rubble
Will still support
Any journey that
Happens along,
Still listen to
Whatever song
The wind sings.
The Autograph Tree, Coole Park
Follow the root-cobbled path
past the old walls that
stable the ash trees.
Pass the holly
and patches of clover
until
the park opens
into
a manger for clouds.
These trees must be
hundreds of years old,
the larches especially,
and on one side is the largest
copper beech
you will ever see,
two hundred feet at least and almost
purple, a giant mound
of broad leaves
all the way to the ground.
Someone cut an opening
like for a cave,
and inside,
stalactites of sunlight
hang from the top branches.
Even a hard rain
would not touch you here.
And on the trunk,
whose circumference
is wider
than a conversation,
are the initials:
Yeats. Shaw. Mansfield.
Synge. A.E. Lady Gregory
herself.
But they are more like runes
now,
as the tree
expanded over the last century.
I try to imagine
what kind of knife they used
in 1893.
Something a stable-hand loaned
or perhaps a hunter’s.
The grooves of the letters
are almost smooth now.
How hard had those poets and writers dug
until the blond wood
shone?
No matter. Sharp nibs
cut letters
into memory,
and thousands come here
because they sheltered
so many times
under the leaves of syllables
that protected them
in the roughest weather.
Insomnia
When the fountain stops and falls
for the night, the darkness
is as empty as the silence
above a bowed head after amen.
When the water calms,
the last ripples sink like halos
there is no one left to wear,
no fish-angels to mouth hymns.
Occasionally, a floating leaf
drifts like praise.
The moon rises like a chess piece.
I can almost make out
the black bubbles in the trees.
With no one to distract me,
I can count my steps,
the number as high as history.
The fountain, restless
as a calendar, left when
it knew it had been stood up.
I’m not waiting for anyone
except the sense that tells me
I might now be able to sleep.
I envy the way the saints were able
to sleep. Jerome had
the pillow of the lion’s side,
and a skull to watch over him.
But maybe I can sleep now.
Someone is reading on the other side
of the world. Somewhere a child
is sinking into soft resistance.
The Galway Review 