Not many people know
where the old road goes
I’m older now and it seems
there are more and more
       paved roads
that lead to nowhere —
   most of the time

As a kid, living miles up
  a rough potholed,
country road — a hike away
from the edge a small town
  out in the sticks,..
you come to know onliness,
blind to a journey alone

   I never stepped on
cracks in a town sidewalk —
  never learned what
  "superstitious" was,
    like the other kids
        from town

It wasn't the cracks
  in the sidewalk
I feared to tread;
steppin' on 'em breaks nothing
  already broken —

It was just all so different
than the long walk home
where that old road goes —
grandma always said:
"follow the creek upstream;
it'll always lead you back
  where you belong"

   The washboards
in the steep narrow road
up the hill, were like
  muddy stair steps
in the rainy season

Sometimes I followed
on up the creek below
to the upper log bridge
     swimmin' hole,..
where I learned to listen
to the sweet melody
of unclouded days;
and for a moment
I thought I belonged

     I still haven't
found my way out
  of this memory
I’m holding onto —
because life is just
an unstoppable
season, passing by
    on its own;
   like the way
     rainwater
  in the swollen
creek bed flows:

   And I'm just
another passing September
no one will remember —

   most of the time


Jesse Stillwater ... September 2018

Back bent, she scrubs the last soiled shirt on the board
her mother used when she was a child. She rises, stretches
the shirt before her wearied eyes, knowing there are stains
that never fade away, and pins it aside the others on the line.
As she pours the pan of defiled water onto the snow-capped
ground, she suddenly, as for the first time, observes her hands:
their redness, rawness, their winter-weather-beaten
lines and valleys, like blood on the desert. And she remembers
a time when white satin gloves covered those hands, briefly,
the day she vowed to live with a man, in sickness, for health
had nothing to do with her marriage. She replaced the gloves
for washboards and soiled laundry of blood-soaked shirts
from wounds of a war never won, drenched from the stump
where an arm should hold her, but never can. As she hangs
board and pan on the hook by the door, she recalls
her wedding day, just hours before he, her dutiful husband,
was to dash off in heroics into a battle where dignity remained
on the field among dead soldiers and shattered lives...
where months later shame returned to her half-dead, half-man.

My best thoughts arrive when
I wait for my towels to be cleaned.

Leaning over the sturdy white machine,
contemplating life's intricacies
and delving into quixotic thoughts only suitable
for my delicates in their spin cycle,
that's when it happens.

Suddenly, as the bumps and whirrs of a laundry room
fill my headspace, I am
Socrates, I am Plato,
one finger heaven-oriented as my clothes spin,
spin, spin.

I can only imagine if Phaedo was
conceived in the throes of laundering.
As slaving women with their washboards
worked tirelessly on his thinking linens,
that's when Plato must have done his
best philosophizing,
when Napoleon felt his tallest.

My best thoughts arrive when
I wait for my towels to be cleaned.

Leaning over the sturdy white machine,
contemplating life's intricacies
and delving into quixotic thoughts only suitable
for my delicates in their spin cycle,
that's when it happens.

Suddenly, as the bumps and whirrs of a laundry room
fill my headspace, I am
Socrates, I am Plato,
one finger heaven-oriented as my clothes spin,
spin, spin.

I can only imagine that Phaedo was
conceived in the throes of ancient laundering.

As slaving women with their washboards
worked tirelessly on his thinking linens,
that's when Plato must have done his
best philosophizing,
when Napoleon felt his tallest.

thunder saw the eye of storm, it saw cutting
wind, hail crashing down hard. mud on streets,
snapped limbs swooped,
zig-zag bolted sky. slick night dash of cars.
things built of metal, left out turned to rust.
banging shutters tapping house like a drum, or
fingers scratching them like washboards in a
jug band.
listen to backdoor radio, jamboree of the night.
nighttime animal sounds on speaker, thunder
greeted broiling sky, lit-up like a firecracker
show. refuse flew in cloudless sky, rain
put out fire.crickets played fiddles in grass,
as wind blew panpipes. people heard nature's
chords as a eulogy to the snake-skin
of parted days.

She was never that close to her mama
who wished her kids independent
but there was the day mama taught her to drive
out in the field where the only thing to hit
was the single large oak in the middle of the pasture.

The old stick shift was a challenge
requiring all the coordination of legs and arms
the teenager could muster.
Then mama left her alone there to practice
and she was glad being by herself,
the intimacy of learning to drive with mama made her uneasy.

Being sixteen and able to drive
a turning point for her
able now to get away from home
to find boys with her friend gave them a thrill -
adulthood’s first stirrings.

They searched for dance halls
where Cajun musicians played
fiddles, accordions and washboards
and she danced the two-step
and boys showed off their moves.

Her mama gave her a rite of passage
with those driving lessons
cut her loose into a wider world
where she would go to India
have her first baby
and practice loving her children
into their own adulthood.

Cleaning washboards
On the back of my president lane
I am the reflection of a world
That was once ours
That died when we lost faith in the system
The centuries remain the same
I'm a dead president still alive
The song remains the same
"Hang 'em"
On the bloodied walls of underground thoughts
Life's do or die, and the washboards lose the cut up bones
A dog dug the ground and hid the frenzy

Dig sally up