The Old Man and the Beanstalk
by Alina Wilson
Three beans in the clay pot,
one for each hope left to the old man.
A week passes with soil still bare,
watered by thick hands,
until the morning a single stalk
bends its neck to the sun.
Noon. He waits for his son,
beef stew cooking in the pot,
rises, once, to check the slight, green stalk.
The night smells of burnt onion. The man
does not eat and the door handle
does not turn, too shy to bear
his steadfast gaze and bare
itself in turn. The morning sun
unrolls its slow heat a handsbreath
across the sill, limns the clay pot
and the table where the old man
sleeps, restless. The beanstalk
seems no bigger, lacks more stalks
for context. Dream bares
its throat to waking. The man
finds a brief message from his son,
who is sorry he forgot. A pot
of coffee later, the shaking in his hands
has faded. He soaks the soil in handfuls
of water, tender of the brown stalk.
He is sorry he let the pot
dry. A story then, low-voiced, of a bare
field that grew a sturdy beanstalk and a son
who climbed it and became a man,
or maybe a thief. Where is a man
who can reach that high, hands
giving instead of taking? Too much sun—
the old man is baked as dry as the stalk.
He spills out two dead beans, the stalk and the barren
earth, then walks away from the empty pot.
Alina Wilson will be graduating from Canada’s University of Victoria this year with a double major in both Writing and in Germanics. After that, she intends to spend some time in Germany, working as an English-teaching assistant.