I acquired you as an infant from a gentleman who needed parts for a radio he planned to invent. listening to his radio was a long way off. you sat early. you called me mother before I was ready. if I was good, you’d play a videocassette to watch it dream. I looked at stars and you were a toddler. our life was life on other planets until the gentleman returned. he said he’d seen satan in a space suit and that satan had given him signs of sexual abuse. you were not unrecognizably depressed but did start a fire in a photograph.
the longer
I grieve
the more
toss frogs
into a fire
your father made.
find a woman
who’s abandoned herself
to being led
by a stick
let her blind mongrel
lick your palm.
bury a handful
of gravel
call it
the moon’s
grave.
hide in houses
hidden
from road.
make at least one friend
whose night vision
is a glass of milk.
double your body
by walking
drunk.
you will know
the hoof
of satan’s
chosen
deer
by the way
it glows
when any
female
announces
from the seat
of a stilled
tractor
that she
is pregnant-
you will be the age
of your mother’s
baby bump
older than your father’s
knife
and lit
by the grape
in god’s
mouth
ideas
are the sickness
health
provides.
thoughts
are two sons
for a jesus
whose fathers
one heavenly, one earthly
never had
to touch
a woman.
the pain is not tremendous.
lo it has kept me
from hurting
my kids.
sinker
of water’s
heart-
spotless thought
free of bird-
weakener
of hill’s
resolve-
kisser of my enemy-
tireless swallower,
impossible drink-
who don’t
I think
I am?
closer inspection
reveals
my lover’s cigarette
to be unlit
as he waits
outside
the madhouse
I rob
(review by Barton Smock)
Uttering The Holy
Adam Hughes
NYQ Books 2012
I think of God as a man in a chair at a desk having a hard time believing. I open this book.
“ Sometimes completeness is a myth
worth constructing.” – from Meditation on the Dried and Severed Back Leg of a Grasshopper
Adam Hughes writes as if watched. By this I mean with a fussiness that says in all seriousness the toys themselves are at play. It is in this manner that faith becomes more than the one-way prayer of the worried. It is in this manner one can apply degrees of gentleness to certain tortures, and unabashedly believe.
“- a gentler torture,
the castaway, alone, mouth open, collecting drops of rain, believing
that with enough ocean, the tongue will become a raft.” – from The Gentler Tortures
The thing called thing for being inhuman, he calls it God, and it visits to see itself dissected. Verse is a haunt of moving parts.
“I can hear the voice
of deity speaking
some extinct language–”
“I forgot to turn off a light
before leaving on vacation”
“whisper a psalm in God’s dead
language, and fill my head with
scents of departure” – all from Kairos Hymn Fragments
Hughes is not a preparatory poet; the visit is ongoing.
“ The end is merely
roots, clinging to nutrients no longer needed, a whispered
narration as the wind blows the snowflakes. Tomorrow
I’ll look for a sapling and call it ancient.” – from The Art of Decay and Time-Lapse Photography
The book itself is a monster, wrestled. To the ground, offered a hand, and dusted off. It has a Prologue, an Epilogue, and a PostScript. Its middle is a local glossary of manmade words for the spirit and for the spirit’s mourning of all things tactile. Hughes finds the shards of glass in the footprint and locates the colorless apparition of the ambitious ambiguous.
“ I see eyes
in the acorn fingertips
of oaks; the spent shells of locusts
cling to trunks and remember
the feeling of fullness
*
one year later
constellations have migrated
one click of the telescope, stars that died
before the Flood are showing their
faces of death to Earth-we’re late
in mourning their passing “ – from In Anticipation of the Anniversary of a Death
If we are overwhelmed, do we overwhelm God? The last stanza in the poem Travelogue had me making a bed for that worried man still at his desk.
“ that night I hugged
my daughter, felt her glow radiate
through my body, and was thankful
for the fog and the leaves that enveloped
the mountain “
As a poet, Hughes strikes me as trying to undo the knowledge of knowing what he’s talking about. Expertise is fleeting. One must root to the permanence of undertaking. In attempting to utter the holy, Hughes success is his utterance of a perceived repetition the likes of which the reader has only just heard.
http://books.nyq.org/title/utteringtheholy
http://www.spdbooks.org/Producte/9781935520610/default.aspx
the second coming of self harm has entered a town called Both.
having a baby is a mouthful.
–
think of yourself as a journal death keeps.
though younger
than a father’s
nostalgia
you are
my boy
of 10 years
this day
which has
always been
a reflection
of how I miss you
on the others
