Up early and feeling frisky, October’s moon whistled a

dusky tune through pursed lips, and as one the flock of

cumulo-orpington clouds bustled eastward to fluff

and settle wing to wing on the roost of purpling crags.

©Dana Hughes 10.2.17

The storms came on heavy and low like peasant women

dragging gray baskets of laundry to the hills where they

flailed their sheets against the rocks until the water ran

clear and each sodden piece was wrung nearly dry.

What remains of clouds now are linty fragments

trailing shadows on the heights so the mountains

become a pack of brindle hounds sleeping in the sun.

©Dana Hughes 10.1.17

The burr of a Black Hawk helicopter in miniature

announces his arrival at the feeder, and perched

on the slender rim he slips the needle of his beak

into the metal flower and downs the hummingbird

equivalent of a pint like one of the boys at the local.

He’s fancy and he knows it, a jewel gleaming in the

morning sun, yet pugnacious as he is petite, and

should the thirsty neighbor fly near for a sip he’ll

streak like a dart to the target giving it down country

with the bullying beat of his wings.

Isn’t it curious that in creatures so lovely and small

there hammer such flagrantly inhospitable hearts?

Perhaps the expulsion from Eden was carried out by

a hummingbird when Eve sought forbidden nectar,

or maybe Darwin is right: survival belongs to the flittest.

©Dana Hughes 9.21.17

After the storm walloped the coast

and before it spun itself out like a

weary dervish in the mountains to

the west of here,

it took the pecan tree by the throat

and showing not a lick of mercy

throttled it ‘til the entire harvest

was flung down.

It’s too early for them to cover so much

ground, mounded in heaps of green

amid root and moss, their flesh still

thick and unyielding.

You gathered them anyway,

hauled them to the sink and washed the

grit away, then arrayed them with hope

on a yellow towel to dry.

May they ripen into sweetness,

shells hard and crackable, because

the pie you’re bound to make will taste

better if it’s brown instead of green.

©Dana Hughes 9.20.17

The need for more sky drove me west

from the canopied south.

It packed my bags, filled the tank and

blew the horn just once.

I was strapped in and champing before

we cleared the street.

Now I stand on a dusty knoll at evening

watching the sun pull

a cover of high cotton clouds to its chin

turning everything pink,

PINK I tell you, and dazzled I wonder

if the Maker gets as giddy

mixing colors as I do by merely looking up.

© Dana Hughes 9.17.17

Tumbling to earth now the wax of these wings is melted,

the faint embrace of clouds lets me pass through like a

slippery newborn, and as such I blink and blink as though

betwixt the heights I achieved and the hard fact of gravity

I might yet devise a way to do something other than fall.

For all the hubris of taking the sky, I did, by God, fly,

and the heat just before the feathers loosed was lovely,

a deep shuddering pleasure that I would seek again if

only I could bounce without breaking.

©Dana Hughes 8.30.17

I’m not sure what to make of this Eclipse

thing with everyone I know going off

somewhere to not look at the sun through

pinhole glasses at the moment the moon

sashays between it and us and for a minute

or so day will become night and the owls

will hoot and coyotes howl not with confusion,

as most assume, as though they can’t tell the

difference between one or the other during a

celestial event but because unlike the spectacled

masses cheering on the darkness they know this

murk will not lift anytime soon unless we face it

open-eyed and unafraid.

©Dana Hughes 8.20.17

The box of dolls

with Sharpie dark eyes

and frazzled hair

left behind when you

grew too tall to

play with small things

would so gladly

gather at the tiny table

for a beer instead

of tea but you must pour.

© Dana Hughes  8.15.17

No one came to me with questions and, really, who would ask a stone?

Yet I could see their eyes roll white like cows with swollen udders,

crying for sure hands as they came and went, seeking any clue

to the mystery of why I was moved and he was gone.

If they had caught their breath and listened, I would have told them that

since the first third day, when the waters were gathered into one place

and the dry land appeared, I have felt the roll and tumble of creation

and like no other I know the thrum of life and its absence’ hush.

I’d have said that as sentry to a grave I expected no more than silence,

for the bones that enter stay still ‘til another’s are brought and those

removed, yet in the quiet hours, I’d say, when night grew thin

and purpled the dawn on the second third day,

I felt my cold back warm, the air stir, and in that bleak hollow behind me

a heart thumped, gaining rhythm as slack lungs shuddered and filled.

What could I do, I’d ask, but roll away? It was never my place

to hold the living among the dead.

© Dana Hughes  4.27.17

The ferns pushing up their fiddle heads

in the window box are not the delicate

things conjured as mouse-sized violins

for a fairy hoe-down with sprightly reels

bowed on gossamer strings,

rather these are colossal, dark and hairy,

Late Cretaceous holdouts unfurling scrolls

of primordial bass viols that drone a C so

low only creatures house-crushingly huge

might tap their massive toes.

The panes through which I stare tremble at

the sound or maybe its just me that shakes;

either way I’m certain that while the music

of nature deserves attention, seeing who

else is listening does not.

©Dana Hughes 3.13.17