Acyanoblepsia*
by Jack Stewart
Can you blame them?
Instead of dying,
The current saints moved to Miami,
City of villas the color of Fra Angelica’s
Temperas, the holy pinks and the pastel greens
He never had a chance to imagine.
They have gained weight and lie in hammocks
So they can stare at a clear sky.
They understand it was a choice:
The swift and torturing arrows
In the lung, the thigh, the flames eating
Screams more vivid than triptych oils,
Or feeling the slow despair of earth,
The humid hand of God closing
Around their bodies,
Which a waist-deep wade
In the ocean can’t soothe.
But a 7th-century cousin never saw
A hurricane rip palm trees out of their sockets
Or jellyfish blister a coastline.
A 9th-century relation never felt the anguish
Of devotion shriveling.
Who could blame their choosing to walk a beach
And pick up tear-drop coquinas?
They understand that one day
They will look up and be unable to see
The Virgin-Mary blue of this sky,
Just a few gulls drifting like white leaves
Across a broad slate clouded with answers erased,
Answers still there for someone, there once
For them, which they can’t remember and are
Desperate to know again. They will feel the sinking
Rejection like air aching out of lungs
Under water, and the absorbing pain
Of that collapse—and soon, every night,
nightmare the sudden swish of a tail,
The shark-mouth crown of thorns.
*The inability to see the color blue
Jack Stewart was educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University and was a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology. His first book, No Reason, was published by the Poeima Poetry Series, and his work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Poetry, The American Literary Review, Nimrod, Image, and others.
