Frank Stewart

Circling slow and dripping like a fat June bug in the rain,

turbos throbbing in the labored

dark over Chicago, the Electra turned, one wing

pivoted up, like an old dog tilted on three legs,

smelling dank, an old heaviness in him, as though

he were about to tumble over toward those glorious,

snowy lights below. There might have been

freezing sleet as well. In any case, I know

I laughed into a glass half filled with bourbon,

glanced again at the two feathered props

out the window, their cowlings charred and smoky.

But freed all at once from months of killing depression,

elated strangely, almost uplifted.

In Stockholm that icy day

the rain blew from the north and then

by noon the run broke through; by three

the Swedes were outdoors sunning in thin sleeves,

strolling as though it were Easter,

while you and I, like birds of paradise

lost in Lapland, huddled in doorways, bitten through.

Everyone about us smiled at one another; we fought our way

street by street to our hotel, and buried ourselves

under blankets. And sighed at the lonely

displacement. How little we knew then,

newly married, of the cold that finds

the remotest parts of the body to lodge,

that there’s no defense except by slow degrees

to become acclimatized. And for a cold this deep

it would take years of freezing.

The last of my father’s brothers, that year

(a year before my father died at fifty-seven)

Jack refused to say goodbye to anyone –

instead he’d laugh and only turn away

as if his departing guests were simply

stepping out a moment into his yard

to listen to nightingales or smell the jacaranda

and sweet magnolia thick as constellations.

The brothers seemed to have a clock inside them,

set at fifty-six or so, Jack said.

And the best of them go out face down in the leaves

at home, and the worst in a drunk tank

in borrowed shows. Lucky, he said, the man

who knows the number of his days. Lucky

twice over if it’s autumn and the red leaves

and yellow rain haven’t given all their kisses away.