POETRY
School of Mysteries & Certainties
Doubts are the ants in the pants of faith. They keep it awake
and moving. — Frederick Buechner
Beginning Drawing I
My daughter pencilled this picture
her first studio art class;
at home, it graces our mantel
lending us perspective: grey
painstakingly rendered gloss
layers shade, one floor tile at a time,
some ho-hum hallway inside a university block
with zero architectural sublimity, yet
the gaze is drawn to an open, windowed end —
a floor to ceiling corral of wild sky,
heaven’s expanse bound by four right angles.
Ocean Play II
Saint Augustine at the beach mused on
a sand hole & a boy who tried to fit the ocean inside,
dripping one pink shell scoop at a time
he could’ve played much deeper,
brine-crusted, immersed
in waters limitless.
Intro to Suffering
Old Yeller. Elephant Man. Cuckoo’s Nest.
grey-visaged pictures that visited
my snug childhood, left me sweating sobs
by the end credits, undone;
they teach me at a tender age
suffering, injustice, death.
Advanced Slaughter III
If I’d memorized as a child some prayer
of protection comprehensive as a Celtic lorica
(like St. Gildas encompassed buttocks, bowels,
cartilage, the enamel of each tooth; invoked
a guard over nostrils, eyelashes, uvula) then
maybe I’d’ve known — a tingle in every bodily orifice & nook —
what to do after watching my parents lead our black angus
up the old bank barn, banishing me to the house.
In silence, I sicken, startled to find
organs of heart, tongue, brain floating cool, open
plastic pails of pink water inside four shed walls, shrined.
Principles of Contemplation I, II, & III
The movement of my grandma’s hands, incessant as
my habit of watching her
worry stone stored up slick within its red vinyl aumbry
of dashboard shelf, inside her stick shift Chevette — she delivers
cookies & grandkids; her blue eyes, shining as her golf clubs
& metal canning jar lids in the hatchback, wink.
Never content to simply sit idling
on the front porch, she works, her snub nose busy stippling
its sweat, like limpid beads of a rosary unstrung,
or clear honeydew spheres for ants, swollen
as her fingers meanwhile snapping off the ends of a big mess
of garden beans, both wax & green, piled in a yellow bowl —
so much sunshine, ora et labora, held in her ample lap
with me, a porch sitter for sure, my nose a replica of hers; tho
each salty bead has now reabsorbed, restrung decades
in recesses under my skin,
spinning worlds
ants build;
their sublime, subliminal architecture swells. Content to
sift & glean certainties, storing up questions to savor, later
link like army ants with other writhing bodies, float
in relationship — life raft or living rope of sky bridge
to chasm-cross. At the summons, move out
on currents of air or ocean, with organs & orifices open:
eyes open, mouth open, hands cupped open as patens
to receive holy mysteries, homed
wafers, painstakingly rendered
layers of body & blood. Goldleaf, this
skin & spirit tissue stuff, if rubbed in limited grasp …
vanishes to dust.
Jennifer Fair Stewart is the author of the chapbook Marginalia: An Interactive Book of Hours (The Orchard Street Press). Her poetry has won multiple awards, including the 2024 Rhina Espaillat Poetry Award with Plough, and appears widely. Find her at https://jenniferfairstewart.carrd.co/
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