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Robert Earl Stewart

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National Geographic

The outfit you wore to our wedding points a Kalashnikov
at a photographer. The knit sweater you wore

to the church picnic in ’86 balances bananas on a wicker
trivet in a feverish slum. A denim skirt I have no specific memory of

bulges unexpectedly around a cipher learning to read in a blasted-
out school house somewhere sickening and hopeful, like the port

the container ship will maneuver into, weeks after we’ve gone through
your closet and drawers.

I inherited this subscription from you like a coin:
like voice, like temperament.

And where other subscribers and newsstand perusers see warlords’ wives
gun boating in Yves-Saint-Laurent at a stronghold outside Port Loko;

some sloe-eyed sapling curved around a desk in Malanje,
dressed for a square dance at the missionary church;

or a fruit-bearing matriarch in Tabi International
cruising the ghettos of Pointe-Noire,

they see the coordinate results of charity, while all I manage to see
are the disembodied clothes, as familiar to me as your rhythm and the sound

of you working in the kitchen on Iroquois; a purse in the crook of your arm
from the far end of the mall; the polished wood of your voice in song...

It’s one of these mismatched ensembles I find shackled to a bench
in the back of a DeBeers truck, having been found where the dunes

approach the ocean south of Walvis Bay, picking diamonds from the sand
ahead of the vacuums, or so the cutline tells me.

Robert Earl Stewart’s poetry has appeared in magazines and journals throughout the United States, Canada and Great Britain, including Nthpostion, Magma, This Magazine, Monday Night and Rampike. His first collection of poetry is due out in fall 2009 from Mansfield Press (Toronto). The curator of the glasspoeme photoblog, he lives in Windsor, Ont. with his wife and their three young children.
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