“Self-portrait as a Child (1984)” (2024)
Albert John Belmont
Oil on Canvas
I never tried to make it sound like a religious experience
or a phenomenon of symbolic significance.
I never tried to hide my pleasure either.
Vulpes vulpes Linn
not known as a city dweller.
She trotted across an expanse of highly manicured
back yards
resplendently red in the noonday sun.
Elegant as a myth, puffed tail sloping
black nose to the wind
black tipped ears perked
never cast a glance my way.
I watched and thought about it for a long time.
She didn’t belong there.
Neighbors were singularly and collectively
unimpressed.
Lots of them in those woods, they opined
conjuring woods
from two tree lines between fences
a small stream through the middle.
No country for a fox den
but there she was
faster than a coyote, more agile than a dog
a feline-like disdain for humans.
They get through the slats to the garbage
the neighbors say.
I never saw a fox eat garbage
but homeless in the big city is never pretty.
New day new chance to risk it all
pure and to the bone
no net.
Three preteen boys slide unnoticed
in the predawn wintery
luminance
through the corral of ill fated
steers monstrous bloated.
The boys slip
as mercury
between
the steaming mass
of bovines
pool at
the slaughter-house outer wall
then climb one by one
the treacherous
cinder blocks
staggered
just enough for a toe hold.
From the summit
they will see
death.
Smell fear as the beasts
are prodded through
the narrow chute
roll huge eyes
bellow
and are struck down
quivering breathless
struggle with
paralysis.
Hauled up gutted a still pulsing heart
the stench of fresh blood
exhilarating
terrifying.
The boys hide in silence
on the roof
never
feeling more alive.
The Cautionary Man knows that his time is near—
knows that his form no longer
fits easily into this curvature of space
his world a reliquary for memory of the no longer here
Doubt and fear
have lost recriminative weight.
Just as thrill and rapture have wrapped a red eye
around foolish pleasure.
Each morning the rattle of achieve, achieve
further loosens its grip on consciousness.
The man lifts his stiff body from the kitchen chair,
to walk across the field outside his door.
He carries with him only a tin cup tied to his belt,
tinking to his thin legged steps on stubbled ground.
He comes upon a stream where the cup is filled with water,
and he drinks deep and cold, and dips,
and drinks again
the deep cold morphine of moving on.
Bobby Steve Baker: I am a Canadian/American writer/photographer/neuro-ophthalmologist. I grew up in rural Ontario and like many of my classmates eagerly took the opportunity to leave. I have spent most of my professional years at academic institutions in the south. Although I live away from my birthplace it never left my heart. I now own a 100-year-old house on the Northeast shore of Lake Huron and spend every summer there. Many of my poems come from the enjoyment of isolation and self-reliance that ecosystem encourages.