I was the one who was supposed to die, badly. People
labeled me Wild Boy, The Gone-Astray Child, everyone—
including my parents—swore at me, swore I’d
do something monumentally stupid
and get myself killed without proper salvation
before I even turned eighteen. Do-Gooders’ hands rubbed together
relishing righteous attempts to guide my wayward path: teachers
secluded special seats just for me next to their stern desks,
Sunday School leaders scolded and thumped me
for asking big questions, daring with skepticism
of six-day sinners achieving heaven with an Amen
on the Sabbath. They wanted me slow-dunked baptized,
dreamed for me an emergence into sensible light.
I did not behave or believe in the conventional way.
But I knew God. Their narrow deer-trail through pine forests
at dusk felt instinctively wrong, predators waiting
for the predictable parade to meander into the claws
of a bad ending. Their sacramental wine wasn’t the union
pounding through my bloodstream. I drank myself silly with
curiosity and impulse—if there was a bridge
with cool or roaring water beneath it, I jumped.
Some baptisms require a cloistered spiritual union
bursting with fountainous joy. If there was a winter roof,
a snowbank humped below, I sailed out into the air body wrestling
with gravity. Whenever my mother sermoned “Be home early”
I found myself tromping night-shadowed woods and streets
and lonely graveyards, communing with owls and the dead,
lambs and crosses silent on the departed’s granite footstones.
When my father demanded that I get down to business
and bear down on mathematics, I scribbled poems in the margins,
the equations of fire words burning out of my fingertips
and overwriting all order and logic.
I tried to live in that cool shadow that people cast out
with their holier-than-me expectations. I endured the chill
and for a while I wondered why I seemed to wither and fall
and return to the soft-needled soil beneath the feet of so many
wise men and women, lined up one after the other.
I felt a pull—not down, but forward, and a timeless flow
has landed me in this divine future, breath
still drinking deep. Those words inside of me
keep burning their way through my skin, while the arguments
of saintly others have lost their icy touch; the bridges keep rising up
high above eternal splashes of beauty—and though I can’t win
against gravity, I fight it every time the air calls my name.
I haven’t witnessed my own grave yet, and it’s nothing I ever
jump to or dwell upon. I’m still running
beneath the moon, sharing calls with night birds,
and in the daytime there’s a sun shining
with a kindly scorch on what others swore would be
pale, still, and cold—but I live, I am blood-warm,
and the pulse inside of me continues
seeking God and more baptisms, pursuing
fire, air, a current of steady embraces.
_
Scott T. Hutchison’s work has appeared in Poet Lore, Georgia Review, and The Southern Review. New work is forthcoming in Evening Street Review, Illuminations, Dash, Steam Ticket, The Citron Review, Arkansas Review, and Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel.
© 2023, Scott T. Hutchison
Halfway Down the Stairs 