SM Stubbs
Two Poems
Canticle of Loss
From the bottom of the mountain, we’ll hear them weeping. That’s what it says in a
guidebook we find on a shelf at the hostel: an order of monks aspires to a
meditative state between presence and hallucination, a precise degree of disorientation. They perform a rite they say reveals a portal to the divine and when
it opens, they keen in reverent nocturnes. Locals gather at dusk, build fires, share
jugs of wine. Several smoke carved bone pipes. No one’s allowed to climb to the
monastery. We tremble though it isn’t the temperature, it’s how the women whisper
and smile, how the men clutch each other in anticipation. The sun disappears. Their
somber notes are low, at first, breaching over us. A sob wrenches the dark as the
liturgy of tears begins. The chorus swells with measures of sorrow that obscure the
stars. We take communion from a stranger’s bottle. The voices rise, the voices fall.
What we hear sounds like whale-song. It washes down, fills us, makes us swell with
wonder. The flames reveal every wrecked face around us, each one determined to
lose themselves away from any visible light.
Geographical Scarcity
Along the Hudson Valley: towns in other states were quainter and cleaner and we
couldn’t understand why New York’s looked like relics of the industrial revolution.
We ate pizza and ice cream and found a bowling alley that hadn’t changed in forty
years. We passed junkyards with stacks of cars piled at the gates. I said I could’ve
been a mechanic or carpenter, anything where I worked with my hands, anything
more strenuous than typing. We were hoping to find a location to relocate to but
even there the price of real estate made us cry. Saugerties had the best chai. Hudson,
the best overpriced antiques. Beacon was lovely, especially main street with its low-
key capitalism. Each town was more expensive than the others. One morning we
checked the tides and walked to the lighthouse on the river. Herons posed on mile
markers as if we’d come to paint them. According to the posted signs, the local
population of otters continues to shrink so please be careful. We spotted prints in the
mud near shore, then my wife saw movement far off in the water. It was the first
time either of us had seen one in the wild. For two hundred yards, it swam straight
towards us as if it had news the world should know. At the last second it dove
under and we waited thirty minutes, hoping to see it surface again, wondering what
news we’d missed.
A former bar owner in Brooklyn, NY, SM Stubbs was born & raised in South Florida. His first book, Learning to Drown (Gunpowder Press 2025), was selected for CLMP’s Notable Poetry of 2025 list. He has been a staff scholar at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Nominated for the Pushcart, Best of the Net and Best American. His work has or will appear in Shō Poetry, Lousiville Review, Tar River, New Ohio Review, Swannanoa Review and others. More information can be found on his website, smstubbs.com.