Author: dlshughes

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Old Man With Cracker

In a booth in a corner of a diner beside a woman

with smooth skin an old man sat with a cracker

in one hand and a knife tipped with butter

in the other, and he buttered that cracker from

north to south and east to west and all points in

between and though he seemed to listen to the

woman while she talked and pushed things around

on her plate, it was clear he was preoccupied

as he worked the butter into every dimple,

enveloping each grain of salt in a creamy

coat so that the cracker nearly groaned with desire for

consummation, methodically working ever-outward

’til he reached the edge and stopped, his thoughts

drifting perhaps to a time when sailors lived with the

fear of sailing over the brink so their ships plied the

bounding main of sky and nothing more, and what

sort of shout would the good mates give to signal

the need to come about, as though ‘man overboard’

could be expanded to include an entire vessel gone

past the boundary of of the sea, but then, half-smiling,

he considered that if the cracker was the earth

and the earth wasn’t flat after all,

he was going to need a whole lot more butter.

 

© dana hughes 4.16.14

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Truth Be Told

This secret I’ve harbored has ossified,

basted with denial until hardened and smooth,

to sit in my heart like bone with no sharp edges

to prick my flesh or my conscience,

until I heard the people shouting in the streets,

and I knew it was starting all over again;

the parade, the waving, your winsome smile,

the knowledge that this is the end

and not the beginning, and suddenly

within the heart’s bone that I carry

there is movement as it pips and breaks free

and I confess at last it was me who betrayed you.

 

I took the silver but he took the blame, and when

you sent him on the mission unlike all the others’,

I hurried ahead to make sure it was done.

In the grove where the others slept and

you begged God for a change of plan,

I stood watch, guarding against a change

in yours, and when the time came with

torchlight through the trees, I gave the signal

with a kiss, but not on the cheek as the story goes;

it was full on your mouth,

and I tasted your sweat and fear,

and you tasted mine,

Then I melted into darkness with the others, and

before the rooster awoke I denied you completely.

I called for your death, and I stripped and

beat you, then washed my hands and nailed

you down. On the cross beside you I cursed

your complacence, and I stood in the shadows

holding my breath ‘til you breathed no more.

 

I despise this turning of the seasons, when it all

comes round once more;  you in your resolve to die

and me in mine to make it so.  It’s a horror,

but it will always be the same; I’ve kept the

bloodied crown for you to wear again,

and I confess, though you know it well,

that it’s me.  I crucify you.

 

© dana s. hughes 4.5.14

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At The Viewing

Peering inside the awful box

where the remains of an ancient uncle lay

overdressed and painted like a floozy,

I realized the conceit of morticians;

 

The pallid skin is spackled

a florid tint and sunken cheeks pinked

to comfort the family with the appearance of sleep,

but the hair parted wrong catches the greiving eye

and testifies that no matter how peaceful he looks,

he doesn’t look himself beacause he’s not;

himself is not just dead but gone.

 

All that’s left wears the wrong pair of glasses

perched on his nose forevermore

–not prescription but readers–

suggesting time and books wait on the far shore,

thus turning comfort curious

and prompting me to wonder;

what’s he reading now?

 

© dana hughes 4.10.14

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Relentless

Rotating as it always does and tipping toward the sun

the earth draws a final frosty breath and exhales spring;

green erupts to the blue song of jays and poplars unfurl

their fluttering leaves like Lazarus shedding his shroud.

 

Amid the wildness, the lenten rose bends its heavy head

downward, listening to the sound beneath sound, a rumbling

counterpoint to the clamor of joy, carried through clay and

pushed through wormholes ’til it finds the air and becomes

 

the squabble of timber and saw, one protesting the bite

of the other; the clangor of iron and hammer,

spitting sparks as a point is made;the bray of a beast that

waits for its rider in the city that kills prophets.

 

The earth spins on while the season sings and the lenten rose

bears witness to the death that always comes in the spring.

 

© dana hughes 4.7.14

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Winter Wind

 

Looking up at bare limbs stripped clean of leaves on a wintery day

when the wind wailed a prelude for the procession of March,

I saw the trees shift, branches reaching for what they couldn’t hold.

The movement made my feet wonder if we were upright or falling

and my hands replied quickly with a grab to the door frame

to show Gravity we were not her toy, though what the trees were

doing defied all I know of earth’s spin and the nature of wood,

in the same way, I suppose, that Nijinsky defies rigor mortis. 

 

Dana Hughes  ©  2.29.14

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The Prodigal’s Progress

The gasp that should have come when i saw you walking toward me

after all this time of pulling shrapnel from my heart, sweeping pieces

into a pile like dry leaves curling toward a match i couldn’t strike

without burning the you out of us, though we were no more than ash,

blown into drifts beneath the nails where your pictures hung, until i

snatched them down in a fury and put them away where they wouldn’t

be found in boxes in the attic, to the left of the stairs, behind the bins

of lights and baubles that you loved more than presents at Christmas,

when you were small, with the smile that melted me, like the one you

wear now because of the child who has melted you, proving the prodigal

did not return alone, but with a son of his own who surely brought the

old man to his knees, like me on mine, opening my arms with a ragged sigh.

 

dsh © 2.26.14

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Cardinal

On a day of bone-cracking cold,

with the sun caught in a slough of blue

like a wide-mouth bass suspended

in the depths of a frozen pond,

the dog snuffled the snow

with incredulity, boggled by the shock

to canine reason that made the need

to pee recede, forgotten,

while in pink-cheeked impatience,

I wondered how long before I froze

where I stood and became a

hitching post tied to a dog

who might not go until Spring.

Then I heard the chip chip chip

of a cardinal as it leapt from ground

to branch and branch to ground

within the shelter of a holly,

and turning, saw the leaves shiver

with the movement and shed

their white coat which fell soft

and slow and seemed like melting,

yet beneath, the ground was dry.

Moses came to mind, polished

smooth from millenia of retelling

how a bush burned without burning

and the frosty heart of Pharaoh broke.

Tethered to my frittering dog,

I put off my shoes, just in case.

©  dana hughes  1.30.14

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Opposable Thumbs

It may have been around the time the coelacanth flopped ashore;

closed it’s gills to water breathing to suck the dry primordial air,

shivered with evolutionary purpose, and stood, stiff-finned–

and walked toward feet with toes and fingered hands,

that the thumb first appeared.

Perhaps like a flounder’s traveling eye it started here and ended there,

better suited to the opposable position from which it spawned

the fist, the grasp, the cerebral cortex and politics,

for it is in the exertion of the thumb against

the fingers that the hand holds,

just as the naming of those against whom one struggles

for ascendance begets us versus them.

One cannot be had without the other.

 

©   dana hughes    1.14.14

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Lost in Translation

 

Last night the cicadas held a concert in the backyard,

singing Stravinsky and a bit of Bartok,

and other symphonic pieces transposed for insect choir.

 

By morning they were spent; gone to their cicada bower

high in the leafy realm to rest their voices.

Yet one remained, trilling a desperate measure of Strauss

as a mockingbird caught her by the wings.

 

All afternoon the mockingbird sings a reprise

of the cicada’s lament, unmindful in her mimicry

that her interpretation is too bright and bouncy

for words of such fervent pleading:

Lassen Sie mich gehen! O ließ mich gehen!

Let me go!  O let me go!

 

©  dana  hughes

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Breakfasting With Birds

Fledged in the avian variant of oshkosh with brown spangles on orange bib,

the half-grown robin studied a bit of katydid left behind on the sidewalk,

picked it up, put it down, picked it up, put it down, turned, tasted

and finally ate it,

then tore through the pinestraw in search of slithery treasure buried there,

while a feather’s length away, proud poppa hopped, and with flutter

and chirp, reminded the lad of the need, while out of the nest,

to eat fast and play less.

 

© dana hughes