“Three Poems from Higher” by Robert Stewart

Press Americana (April 26, 2023)

TASKS DONE AND UNDONE
 
 I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe,
and am not contain'd between my hat and boots.
—Whitman
  
Better today if I had gone home to work
on the wooden gate, which is coming apart,
but the robin has hatched her brood
on the downspout nearby and stares at me
if I get close or make the gate groan, as in a poem
I read recently with the opening line thus:
Would everybody stop dying, please?  Whitman
no longer is contained between hat and boots;
and Roth, this morning announced his silence,
and Pope Francis, himself, says in a movie,
he is not immortal.  The Pope.  So I repeat,
Don’t die, please, and still agree to carry
the casket of my pal Bob, at Jefferson Barracks
National Cemetery, on his way through
the squeaky gate.  I am a realist.  
 
 
—From Higher (The Poetry Press of Press
Americana, spring 2023) by Robert Stewart.
Originally published in Salt, a journal.


CHICKENS KNOWN AND UNKNOWN
 
I loved Chickenman, ca 1966 ff., of Midland City,
I took for St. Louis, then,
on my ‘50 Ford radio, trumpeting triumphantly,
Buck, buck, buuuuuuk. Chicken-mannn,
as he rushed off in his Chicken Coupe
to rescue the still-single Sayde, or to
his human job, selling shoes in the city of shoes –
first in booze, first in shoes (last  
in the American League) – fantastic fowl
of footwear – He’s everywhere.  He’s everywhere –
even over Armed Forces Radio, should
the draft board send me to Fort Leonard Wood.
 
I loved the San Diego Chicken, ca 1974 ff.,
droopy lids and huge beak –
give me a break – a greater physical comic
I rarely have seen, maybe Danny Kaye,
but the Padres got us all through the fall,
as we used to say, of Vietnam,
as the Chicken appeared with Chuck Berry,
Jimmy Buffett, Paul McCartney, then covered
“Do you think I’m sexy?” by another Stewart
on WIL radio, Cardinals fan or not.
 
I never loved chasing chickens, or the chicken
chasing my three-year-old sister Christine
with its head cut off, spurting blood,
or the smell of boiling water poured
for plucking pin feathers, and never, ever
loved Henny Penny—too chicken—
or maybe just me, in my soul,
Huey helicopters hovering over the trees
on Kingshighway and Florissant Road,
dropping a big hook for the delta,
where my buddies hung in the sky, ca 1968 ff.,
by the neck, like rubber chickens.
 
 
—From Higher (The Poetry Press of Press
Americana, spring 2023) by Robert Stewart.
Originally published in Chickenhood (chapbook).
 

WISHES FOR THE WORLD
 
I want to be down on my knees,
pulling radishes in the garden, raised
 
bed or spaded dirt; and if a stranger
comes along, I want to point her way
 
with a radish, or bunch of mustard greens
already tied with twine and lying
 
in a basket with tomatoes.  I want
to lift the nest lid mornings and trouble
 
the comfortable, getting pecked,
sure, but that’s what I want.  I want
 
brown eggs so fresh the shells
hardly crack on the caste-iron ridge
 
of the skillet, scramble them
in chopped radishes, greens—
 
you see all this coming together—
over cool slices of those very tomatoes.
 
It doesn’t sound like much, but
there are so many refugees, I want
 
also to hold their babies awhile
and let feeling return to their arms,
 
and I want to say, sometimes
when I was a kid we had nothing
for breakfast but donuts.
 
 
—From Higher (The Poetry Press of Press
Americana, spring 2023) by Robert Stewart.
Originally published in I-70 Review.

Copyright © 2024 Robert Stewart
All Rights Reserved

Higher, by Robert Stewart, is a Winner of Prize Americana.

PRAISE FOR HIGHER

“Bob Stewart is a superb poet and essayist. His keen eye and supple imagination are among his most remarkable gifts.”

—Conger Beasley Jr., author of We Are a People in This World

“Robert Stewart’s Higher is a treasure: witty, spare, emotionally generous, it offers the reader companionship in troubled times. No syllable is wasted. The poems are delicious and invite us to read and reread, to taste and take in, into the heart, “where you can see / all things as one.” How can a book be humble, idiomatic, and lofty at once? Open this literary treasure chest where the heart beats and the lines sing and begin to find out!”

—Marilyn Kallet, author of Even When We Sleep

Higher can be purchased on Amazon: Higher

Robert Stewart’s book of poems Higher won the 2022 Prize Americana.  Other books include The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art, & Values (essays, Serving House Books); Working Class: Poems(Stephen F. Austin State University); Outside Language: Essays (Helicon Nine Editions, finalist for the PEN Center USA Literary Awards, and winner of the Thorpe Menn Award); and Plumbers(poems, BkMk Press, in revised 2nd edition).  He won a National Magazine Award for editing, from the American Society of Magazine Editors, and served for many years as editor-in-chief of New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. 

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