POEM: Mr. Flangheddy

A poem for one of my high school teachers:


Mr. Flangheddy
By Steven Withrow

Chess prodigies and gifted violinists
Abandoned to a happenstance instruction
Can only long for common compensation
As hobbyists or musicologists.
And so it was for me in Honors English:
Teenage playwright, thin, incipient poet,
No one’s idea of Baudelaire-in-training,
Not even mine, and how might I have known
Me otherwise, how differently foreseen
My green and patternless existence? I glimpsed
Your missive, red, in slim proofreader’s cursive:
“Writing is not a substitute for thinking.
Your sentences extend, but they don’t resolve.
An ailment we can remedy. See me.”
But I didn’t. No. Instead I took a C
And twenty years to trust your invitation.


Copyright 2012 Steven Withrow, all rights reserved

POEM: Purgatory Chasm

There's a state reservation in Sutton, Massachusetts, where my wife and I have hiked in the summer and fall. I've never been there in winter, but I imagine it would be a dolorous place, morosely beautiful.

Purgatory Chasm
By Steven Withrow

Climb an elm limb,
Slow now, on a bowed bough,
Out over a jagged crag.

This granite gorge
Gouged ages past by a blast
Of glacial meltwater,

Not so soul-cleansing
As claims its expiating name,
Remains ravine rock

Riven in a dim bend
Of limbo, ice-dammed cataracts
Called Corn Crib,

Coffin, Devil’s Pulpit,
Charley’s Loop, Lovers’ Leap,
Fat Man’s Misery,

Such malformations
Of stone and petrified sand.
Move hand over hand

To the branch-break
And, reaching there, breathe in
Winter’s indifferent air.

©2012 Steven Withrow, all rights reserved

POEM: The Goaltender

Goalie Tim Thomas of the Boston Bruins

The Goaltender
By Steven Withrow

A netminder’s curse:
To block a black puck.
And even worse

A slight to his pride
Is a five-hole slapshot
On a butterfly slide,

Or a breakaway
At the final flash
Of a power play,

Yet under his mask
Is no sure sign
Of his furious task

To scrape from his crease
Ice-crust of a loss
With bladed release.

His post is his nest.
Like a shorebird,
He barters his rest

For what he protects.
How he frets and he frets
On all he deflects.

He skulls to his stance
For the next puck’s tap,
Dropping his glance

From the scoreboard above,
Hands fixed to his stick
And the trap of his glove.

©2012 Steven Withrow, all rights reserved

Crackles of Speech, my first collection, now available

I have put together my first collection of poems, Crackles of Speech, as a digital book. It's a miscellany of 34 poems written between 2006 and 2012.

Please comment here and include your email address, or email me at stevenwithrow (at) gmail (dot) com, if you'd like to receive a free PDF of the book.

Thank you for your interest in my work.

Steven Withrow
Providence, Rhode Island

P.S. The cover image shown here is a painting ("Menauhant") by my friend Erica M. Szuplat of Cape Cod.

POEM: The Library Steps

The Library Steps
By Steven Withrow

To reach the books we had to leap the lion.
Sculpted stone in place of fierce flesh,
But ferocious enough
To those of us
Who paused to tooth the toothless king
And pedicured his deadly toes
With the flat files of our stares.
We frogged him, one by one,
Palms pommeling his brow
And split legs missing his maw
By inches. When all had passed,
No one looked back. We had won.

Then through double-doors we ran—
Haughty as a hunting party, homebound band
Fresh from a kill that had gone well—
And checked our speed at the desk.

There we made separate tracks.
One to stalk the card catalogs,
Two through a thicket of Children's Fiction,
Leaving me—instantly an I alone—
On walkabout, lost in pride land,
Rippling spines of tall grass blades,
Questing for atlases to compass me
Out of sudden danger. The lion
Had come inside. He'd picked up my scent
And would, like a lioness, dispatch me.

I searched for sign of a high hide,
A ladder to a lookout tower
Stashed within the stacks.
Instead, I haunted a payphone booth
Until closing time, slipped outdoors
Among the throng, rejoined my gang,
And we leaped the lion's head again,
Stone tongue tasting our fingers.

Copyright 2011 Steven Withrow, all rights reserved

POEM: The Buck

The Buck
By Steven Withrow

Invisibly brown
As the headlamps seize
On his antlered crown

This phantom wood-woad
Ambles to the verge
Of the brambled road

Dogging his doe
With a heartsick vim
That grips him, though

The car’s glare stuns
His love-glazed eyes
Like doubled suns.

To the driver, time
Has staggered and stalled
In a pantomime

Of startled stag
Raking the slow wind
Once with a jag

Of his heavy rack
And a rime of ice
Down his stiff brown back.

The braking wail
Mimics the mutts
That nipped at his tail

Till, shaking his fears,
Trembles the hedge
And he disappears.

Copyright 2011 Steven Withrow, all rights reserved

The Crooked Captain Hook
By Steven Withrow

My first name, dear reader, is James.
But that is just one of my names.
I acquired the hook Hook
When the crocodile took
Off my hand...
Oh, the depths of my shame!

Yet my story’s true villain is Pan.
He’s the boy-who-will-never-be-man.
His delightful good form
Is a shipwrecking storm
To a captain…
But I’ve got a plan!

I’ve a perilous plank he will walk.
Watch Peter Pan sink like a rock.
And his Lost Boys I’ll bait
And his Wendy will—wait—
Do you hear
The tick-tock of the clock?

Do you hear
the tick-tock
of the clock?


©2011 Steven Withrow all rights reserved