Hobble Creek Review
Hobble Creek Review
Brent Fisk
Candling

The wren scours the yard for seed,
dips from eave to sagging clothesline to shed.
Her six white eggs will not hatch though she holds hard
to the soft thatch of the dead nest.

Those determined daily flights leave me blue,
and I wonder if something that moves so swiftly
can ever be drawn down by grief.

Her song filters through the undergrowth,
dappled and bright as June, more endless
than the cloud shadows that creep  
the yard like a hungry cat.  

She wobbles on a dogwood twig,
works her beak through her pale brown feathers.
A wasp bumps up the clapboard wall,
begins its own fragile nest.

My girls will scramble from the bus in an hour,
a long swollen summer before them. Some days I wish
I could hold their futures up to a strong light,
know if what’s there is vital and good.
But that knowledge, like the wasp, could sting and sting again.
I will love blindly like the wren,
weave a nest of worry and hope,
make a home of thorns and down.




Birthday

A mid-April day without rain.
My younger brother curls on the couch,
dreams of Holland, windmills, tulips.
He’s a boy who holds back the sea.

My mother wastes piles of rags
on every dirty window.
This labor a small echo
of my brother’s birth, a sudden rush
of water from an inner sea.

The house is cool with the windows open.
A cardinal sounds a birthday song.
When Father comes from his extra shift
he’ll wipe the steamy mirror like another dirty window.
He washes away the grime,
a swirl of weariness disappearing down the drain.
He towels off and takes us out for dinner.

My brother’s quarters slide in the jukebox slot.
He selects songs at random, the way it sometimes appears
my parents chose each other.
My father’s beaten wallet is rich with ones and fives.
His shoulder aches from building seawalls--
his back in knots, each day reclaimed from an ocean
of work. My brother sags in the vinyl booth,
dreams of gold, of treasure maps, of being older
with a dagger clenched in his teeth.
My mother glows at our table,
a small candle that lights our way.






In Transit


My life is a steady diet of diesel fumes,
crackers toppled from vending machines.

In the restroom of a Louisville bus station,
a shirtless man soaps his armpits, half bathes.
A straight razor rocks on the sink basin.

Perhaps this man also has a father
he hasn’t seen in years. He nods
as if we pass each other every morning.
The door is racked by the winter wind.
Heaters hang from the ceiling, glow orange,
false suns.

Years of shiftless drifting
and I have a sudden hunger for the ocean,
a walk through winter’s barren dunes
as the noon tide rises and consumes the beach.
Gusts free the stinging salt, polish glass
into something beautiful and useless.
Brent Fisk has had poetry recently appear in the Southern Poetry
Review, Prairie Schooner, Fugue and Rattle.  He has been
nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times.