elegy for the oft-fabled stepchild
BY ROBERT CAMPBELL
“She slammed down the lid, and his head flew off, falling among the red apples.”
–The Juniper Tree, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Picture him pressed and tucked beside
the kitchen sink, reaching for the fruit bowl.
Picture the room unfathomable: clock
of ivory, red floor, antiqued oak table,
and his head rolling off of its trunk,
clicking open like a lock, in its seventy-
eighth month, in which she blanched
his pieces into nothings as spilled flour
haunted the window, the table. This is
the yard untillable. The ground pushed up
fathoms of stinging weed-flowers. What
if all mothers came out of the red-hot earth
like iron? What if all fathers devoured their
young? What if we could sing to children
like precious stones through holes in the
dirt? What of the Mother Under the Table,
the Mother of Blunders? She who lifted him
from silt, who stuck his mouth full
of glue, as only a mother is able? There
goes the oft-fabled stepchild now,
mind wandering, directionless as pollen,
top lopped off like a dandelion, tumbled
under and thither, rolling among the crab-
apples, past the blue-feathered hills.
i am thinking of the tool shed, jet-black hornets
BY ROBERT CAMPBELL
Rust-eaten shears. Oak stool. Floorboards
worn and cracked. I am thinking of that shed
full of hornets. It leaned its stack beside the creek,
ornery and bent. In cool Octobers, dreadful
ornaments grew in its corners, story-fed, born
through wood-grit, horned and humming. Who
would get the wood there, fetch the rake, wet
from the leaking rain? Stray cats collided. My
youngest uncle’s Marlboro hack. His hair
was red, not jet-black. The hornets burrowed,
then rose above the stacks of firewood, unfurling
like a cloud. Burn it. Scuttling back, blue-black
almost, purring on the pile of boards. This
is the red welt on my leg. Mourn it almost,
the stinging hive-bed. Another memory to tuck
into your sack. But not the worst, the one
the one for which you will pack bags, shut
the tool shed door, let the latch turn, spurn it
like a fool, go off angrier than the roaring
branches in the storm, its sack of cold wind,
its scorn, its mules unfed. Even if you could return,
where would you look for your cracked palms,
your old southern drawl? What would you bet
against the coming clouds? Would you even bet?
