Read me a poem about loss I say. Are you on the mend? I say. I shake my head no. I need a poem to ease my anxiety I say. Why are you anxious I say. I’ve lost the compilation of all my favorite sad songs I say. Have you ever tried listening to opera in foreign languages I say. All opera is in foreign languages I say. No, all good opera is in foreign languages I say. But not to those who understand opera I say. You mean those born in the country of the language I say. No, those who understand out of the greatest miseries survives the greatest beauty I say. You mean the music and the singing I say. I mean everything I say.
for Kasim Riding from Knoxville to the Appalachian forests, I’m hunched in the corner of my seat, next to a man who seems to be unraveling, striving for composure in the way despondent men do: mouth agape & drooling, eyes sunken as if his face intends to make a cave of its own flesh. He moans like there’s some creation struggling to be born, as if he is reincarnating himself, as if doing so will allow him a second chance to avoid mistakes he made in his past life. & I cannot help but feel pity for him, as I recall another bus ride, the number 10 that wound its way around the heart of Knoxville, & you were there beside me, breathing softly, I remember, so softly I felt the machinery of the inner ears churning to process the sounds you were making. I asked what’s the matter, & you hesitated. So I persisted in the same way I did when I urged you to make the long, cold walk from your apartment to mine, to tell you I tested negative when you were not in the mood to celebrate as I had, only hours earlier, with champagne & a lobster tail. & recalling that moment, I realized why your breath seemed to whisper. So I wept. Embarrassed. Which coaxed more tears as I tried to learn compassion. You said the virus had not taken its toll. I was relieved. Or was it our years of friendship that made me unafraid to touch, to wrap my arms around, to shoulder your grief. But where is that compassion now? This man is resting his bleached head on my shoulder. For a moment I think it’s yours. But he mumbles about forsythia, four-leaf clovers. & I’m frightened because I will love you with the same passion that I wonder if anyone will clamor to pay respects to this half-living man. I push him against the window. Scoot farther to the edge of my seat, shuddering when I hear his head knocking against a pane of glass.
is like deplaning in a slow single file conveyer belt of sluggish passengers still wired into their sleep modes since it’s four in the morning everyone shifting through the narrow aisle gathering their wits their luggage but not the human decency to maneuver with purpose as Houdini once did to escape a straightjacket padlocked inside a great tank of water but turtling along as if shackled in ankle-cuffs chains around their waists connecting more chains in cross-sections of heavy metallic links the length of their bodies escorted on either side by guards trundling in their own lackadaisical fashion securing these passengers-turned-captives beneath the arms & down the long corridor they schlepp to the execution chamber shuffling while meantime your head aches in peril the kind of pain that must be like a blown-out tire & no spare & the driver wracking his head against the steering wheel until he groans with regret for not spending a little extra for a measly donut & now he’s stranded on the side of the road with passersby carrying on the usual business of apathy or else there isn’t enough time to stop & offer assistance as they are needed at the airport to collect their friends & relatives whisk them home unaware they’re in no hurry so early in the morning to be “collected” weary as they are as it’s been from Seattle to Portland to Atlanta to Knoxville one insufferable layover & no booze to keep you starry-eyed like a child’s propitious discovery of the well-kept secret hideaway where the candy is kept & he’ll sort through all the options of how to make his belly ache as you would indulging a liquor cabinet’s inventory to reacquaint yourself with a reliquary of spirits you’ve been long without but still jubilant as though you’ve happened upon the most desirable of sundries no more collateral damage of days ransacking a room for even a milliliter titled into the bottom of an errant bottle & later crawling the floor with a lampshade around your ankles purring like a walrus all of this a sign of the wretched past & presently a celebration akin to the serendipitous unearthing of a chest of jewels buried among the ruins of a derelict field if only the drink that brings back your soul will assuage this aching that refers itself throughout your body the way a clot transfers itself from the leg to the left ventricle if it wants to kill a man if it wants to commit itself to healing the suffering you endure when there isn’t a swill of liquor to be had when a kink in the machinery reduces you to shivers if you don’t soon taste the elixir to calm your beating heart coding the S.O.S. as you slope toward the revelation you’re inside the belly of a ravenous beast
Finally I’m trying to forget the impossibility I will ever father a son. Then remembering I’m trying to forget, I remember the forgetting & am heartbroken, lying in bed, twilight slicing horizontal lines into my flesh, as if the arced moon intends to remind me I’m prisoner to a grave fault. & if the stretch of night would give itself over to my grief, I would wrench the crescent—stardust, helixes of galaxies, isotopes, invisible matter— from its smug, overbearing suspension. But how will I feel in the morning, when I overhear the old couple next door arguing because the perfume of her gladiolas has become so overwhelming, & he complains of allergies? But later they make up as there’s something to be said about the long-coupled. They remind me we must find shameless happiness wherever it may be—in woodpiles they spend stacking together, preparing for winter. In the screech of a raccoon chasing ghosts up cedars. Even in the old house of my boyhood, where the neighbors have a son. A boy I’ve seen only in the dim corner of his room, back against window, tucked playing. Some nights I’ve watched him as his father stoops over the hill of his back, gliding hands along the ridges of spine. I watch the child lean into the cupped palm, his father scratching the fine hairs of his head, & I imagine joy welling inside a boy with a face like mine.
Darius Stewart’s poetry and creative nonfiction appear or are forthcoming in The Brooklyn Review, Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Fourth Genre, Gargoyle, Meridian, The Potomac Review, Salamander, storySouth, Verse Daily and others. Stewart received an MFA in poetry from the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas at Austin (2007) and an MFA from the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa (2020). In 2021, the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame honored him with the inaugural Emerging Writer Award. He is currently a Lulu “Merle” Johnson Doctoral Fellow in English Literary Studies at the University of Iowa, where he lives in Iowa City with his dog, Fry. His poems “On the Bus” and “Poem to a Son” were previously published in his chapbook The Terribly Beautiful. Stewart’s first full-length collection of poems, Intimacies in Borrowed Light, was published in July 2022 by EastOver Press.
Images are altered stills from Obayashi’s 1977 film House.
