Mom said OUT and out we went

the screen door adding emphasis

as we scurried onto the porch with

our blanket, book, apples and two

worn decks of cards.

It was hotter in the house than it was

outside even with windows wide, the

fans turning June air like cream in a

butter churn and the babies were

waking hungry.

Mom didn’t need us underfoot so we

took to the feet of the weeping willow

to make our camp in the cool beneath

tendrilled boughs in their dappled

puddles of shade.

She could read and I listened curled

close lest any word roll away in the

grass but when the story outpaced my

interest in the pictures, she’d put

the book aside

and say, “time for apples,” which did

not mean apples only but that the bright

crunch was accompanied by the slap

of cards as she practiced the impossible

art of shuffling.

War was the game and with two decks

combined it was hours before we were

bored, the cards slick with our sweat, the

spokes on the bicycle imprint trimmed

with apple stains.

Finding a breeze came next each day,

and she always went first to show me how

a hand went here, and a foot there until we

found air at the top that made our tree

bend and shimmy.

This was how we played together, her a

little older and more practiced, always

teaching me to reach up like she did,

and I was the perfect playmate ever

willing to learn,

until the day came when we sought a

zephyr and she kept climbing hand over

hand into heights beyond my courage

and she passed the place of turning back

so I was left

alone on the ground with my apple core

and words I couldn’t read wondering how

she could grow up and leave me like this,

under the willow on a blanket with

two decks of cards.

© Dana Hughes 3.11.17

The paint on the canvas of tradition

has cracked with age, pigments dim from

centuries of fervent faithful sighing beneath

the image in a fog of candle smoke, each

certain the tender scene is as it was:

 
tidy corner in a tiny barn strewn with hay

warmed by the weary donkey and a modest

cow nodding near the shining child nested

between kneeling parents, his nimbus

throwing sparks above their heads.

Yet where dull flecks have fallen bright

pigment reveals a rag-wrapped babe pink

and new waking nursing sleeping in the arms

of a spent girl who had pushed this life into

the trembling hands of her husband.

He’d coaxed her like a lambing ewe, tied

the cord and made the cut, then wound in cloth

the part that followed before he carried away

the blood-slick straw and replaced it with

fresh pulled from beneath the animals.

At the well he drew water, warmed it by the

fire he built in the yard and washed mother and

child who together wore his cloak while he

scrubbed the stains from her dress and the

baby’s wrapper and hung the lot to dry,

hoping for a moment between the washing

and feedings when he might burrow beside her

and rest before the curious came to carry off

visions of what they’d seen, leaving out the

messy, human bits, which included him.

© Dana Hughes 1.22.17

The left-over turkey is lodged a thousand miles

from here in the refrigerator of the house that my

son and his girlfriend bought back in June, to the

delight of both sets of parents, anticipating as we did

that something momentous would soon follow,

like an engagement or a wedding.

But we are boomers, that odd generation spawned

when the appearance of global peace beguiled our

parents into reproducing in record numbers; rather

like rabbits, some might say, as though a house full

of kids could stabilize the psychic careen wrought by

Part Two of the World War.

We grew up on a thick stew of things they didn’t have;

straight teeth and television, finished basements, electric

dryers, air conditioning, telephones with extension cords,

second cars and possibility, and yet there was so much

of the hows and whys of their lives that we didn’t want

them to pass along to us.

We took on neighborliness, but not the concern for what

they thought of us or the worry over who they were. We

honored faith, but church was not our axis, and the

sanctity of place was lost on us as we moved far enough to

keep their traditions from influencing our creation of what

we thought were better ways.

Little did we know that in teaching our children to think

like us we also taught them distance and difference, and they

choose not to marry like us or settle like us, or hold their ends

of the cord like us, the one that goes all the way back to Eden

and runs us all through, and God knows, I have prayed that

their rebellion would be a tighter grip.

I didn’t call my Father on Thanksgiving. Perhaps it’s not too late.

© Dana Hughes 11.29.16

The morning after the election when my lungs refused

to inflate,

I saw that I was phosphorescing like a jellyfish, a pulsing

blob of white in a sea of diffuse uncertainty in which

the slenderest slivers of light above the seething calm

were inked out as thousands expelled jets of black

and brown to cloak their shape and confuse the

hunter enticed to these waters by the need to

feed on disparity, to seize and devour even

the shadows to which the tremulous flee

and pray for protection that might not

come in time if it comes at all.

Within the murk now thick with dread, the murmuration

of innocents becomes a mass for the dead, a lament

weary of sundered assurances and hope’s demise,

and well below where worm-scarred timbers lie

amid bones of other others lost or tossed to the

deep and long since adapted to the lack of air,

wide dark eyes mark the flailing above and

unhinged jaws form a soundless sigh of

empathy ascending, for they know

the price of difference will

always be paid.

© Dana Hughes 11.24.16

The chainsaw started just after morning traffic thinned

when the tree surgeons came to euthanize the Hickory

that had a hundred years on the house over which it

leaned in a way that always seemed protective, until

the sap stopped rising and the leaves hung limp and

the lean felt like trouble to those inside the house, and

they knew the time had come to let it go, but like a

milky-eyed hound who can’t find the exit, it needed help.

So the men came to bring the old thing down; two with

ropes who kept to the ground and one wearing spurs who

walked up the trunk and belayed each limb before the saw

sliced like a scalpel through seasons enfolded in the flesh,

ages shouldered within forest thick with poplars and oaks

long before the road was cut and houses planted beneath

the boughs, years when deer wove the underbrush with

scent and boys on the hunt with trigger fingers twitching;

fifteen decades of cradling the nests of those who made

their homes high, raising young on the bounty of nuts

and air, of crooking slender twigs like fingers to choirs

of birds who came to sit and sing,

Here this colossus has stood; witness to the rhythm of

time as only a tree can be. Now it bolts upright, the lean

corrected as the crown is cut and the man with the saw,

lashed to the top, rides the thrashing tree in extremis,

until it calms and ropes carry the crown down and the

singers and nest builders chitter and sigh in counterpoint

to the lament of the neighboring giants that toss their

heads with sorrow and shower the ground with leaves.

© Dana Hughes  10.28.16

The worst of all days was the day Momma died

though to be honest it was a relief because the

years of smoking had taken a toll, even though

she denied she’d had even a puff since she and

Daddy quit together when the Surgeon General

said it was bad for their health back in the 60’s.

There was also heart disease and TIA’s, which,

though small, were tectonic in shifting the vast

contents of her brain, separating hemispheres

so she forgot that she still smoked, but then the

forgetting became routine, so that just now and

back then slipped away with equivalent speed.

She forgot that she had children and children’s

children, forgot that the man sleeping nearby

was her husband, and then she forgot how to

eat and had to be coaxed like a toddler to try a

bite which she’d hold between teeth, clenching

breakfast like a grizzled dog worrying a new bone.

But the forgetting that was worst of all, besides

our faces and names, was the brilliance of her

wit and how her words glittered like jewels cut

so each facet captured her genius, and yet she’d

toss them off like feathers from a bird in flight,

sure there was more from whence those came.

When that was gone the laughter went and joy

withdrew; from the head back and eyes streaming

pealing of the bells to a demure hand-over-mouth

titter, the music of mirth ceased its ringing and that

was when the mother I loved departed, and the

blank-faced, wordless woman arrived.

On the day her body stopped the parody of life,

I hauled her from the tangle of sheets before the

family saw how she’d thrashed her way loose,

straightened her up, tucked her in, smoothed

her hair and closed her eyes, first one and then

the other, then the first again, and again the other.

She popped them open in an alternating wink

that made me throw back the covers and press

my ear to her quiet heart; clutch her hand till it

grew cold, then look to the air and ask that

she cooperate, please, as this display of her

recovered humor would not be amusing just now.

After the children went to college and kept going

we became empty nesters, a term I dislike and a

ridiculous way to speak of oneself when the nest

is anything but empty. It’s full of the chaff they

winnowed when they packed what they needed

for the school years and the after that years.

There are beds we thought they’d want but don’t,

shoes hardly worn in every size and color, boy, girl,

formal, sport, tap, cleat, high and low heeled, leather

and canvas veiled with dust beneath racks of suits,

shirts, dresses and sweaters that slide to the edge of

hangers like snake skin draped on a rock.

There are reliquaries of baby teeth, and first shoes,

tiny forks and tiny spoons, thread-bare blankets that

they shucked and outgrew, games missing pieces, dolls

missing clothes, a billion bits of Legos and the huddle

of basketballs slowly growing cracked and flat.  These

are the things that remain when fledglings have flown.

I built this nest like the other birds, lashing twig to twig

with spider web and lining the core with down and

leaves, but the sweat of my hands, the milk of my breast

and the underpinning of prayer were my invention, and

I bound the form with lengths of my hair, dark at the

center and white toward the rim.

This nest is hardly empty, holding much of them still,

but even more it holds the all of us, the we that we made

and the us that we were when we fluffed and feathered

a tender fortress made to cup them as they hatched,

a sanctuary built for us, to secure the first thing we birthed:

our love.

©Dana Hughes 9.22.16

I can’t say what it was that came in the night

and switched the child with something other,

but in the morning there was skin and hair

and bones in the bed in a size much larger

than what was tucked in, and the me that

I’d been was gone, a changeling in my place.

It rose sluggish and sour to pull on clothes

that couldn’t fit, popping buttons and seams,

crushing my shoes with heavy feet that went

clomping about the house unnoticed but for

the maternal admonition to brush its mane

and try some deodorant, dear, please.

In the afternoon it wandered outside and sat

beside a tangle of bearded iris on which a

cicada husk clung upside down and empty

after the emerging adult had split the back to

unfurl a pair of heavy wet wings that dried

into Tiffany glass masterworks.

With my eyes the changeling saw that hope

is the critter that crawls through the rift

when transfiguration rips us open, but when

everything changes, in the instant between

one form and another, we wondered, which

or what or who is driving that thing?

© Dana Hughes 9.12.16