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Robert Earl Stewart

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The Ice Cream Hour

You trust me the way only a new acquaintance can,
and when you return I’ve been making cones
several times too large, destroying your profit margins,

like you had ice cream to burn.
Everyone’s standing around eating these huge
confections.
I had plans to just sit on that bench
and think about a poem, because the air was pregnant
with that when you curtsied and left with the bouquet.

We’re like a movie made about your trust
and projected against the side of this old bait shoppe,

so that when we talk, we talk about death and
faith and curious birds,

and with my neck camera strap-raw, I begin to suspect
the eagles are our Aloysius Snuffleupagus:
showing up to crash golden talons into the river
for everyone but me.

Or like young Holden’s secret goldfish:
guarded like a jealous oracle kept in the bowl

of your influence, wings weighed down
with mountains of pistachio and tiger tail.

But the hour of ice cream was upon us
like a whole milk plague—

something with nuts, an aether of licorice,
me, handy with a scoop, digging through poison
for ribbon veins—

an hour you told me would come,
as you told me bald eagles fished here,

in the perch-choked shallows off the dock,
every day from their aerie on Fighting Island.

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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