DRINKING  LIFE 

Poem for Today - October 20, 2014

WHAT  LIGHT  DESTROYS

Today I'm thinking of St. Paul—St. Paul

who orders us, Be perfect. He could have said,

Touch your elbow to your ears, except

that if you broke your arm, then snapped your neck,

You might could manage it. The death inside

the flawed hard currency of what we touch

bamboozles us, existing only for that flaw,

that deathward plunge that's locked inside all form,

till what seems solid floats away, dissolves,

and these poor bastard things, no longer things,

drift back to pure idea. And when, at last,

we let them go we start to pity them,

attend their needs: I almost have to think

to keep my own heart beating through the night.

I have a wife and four pink boys. I spin

on all this stupid metaphysic now

because last afternoon we visited

some friends in town. After the pecan pie,

I drank until my forehead smacked the table,

and woke to find my shirt crusted with blood.

When Mary didn't yell at me, I knew

she finally understood that I was gone,

dissolving back. As we rode home, I tried

to say, I'm sorry, Hon. The carriage bucked

 across the mud-dried ruts and I shut up.

And she, in August heat, just sat, head cocked

as if for chills hidden in the hot, damp breeze,

as if they were a sound, time merely distance.

0 Death, I know exactly where it is

your sting. And Grave, I know your victory.

That night, around the tents, the boys caught fireflies,

pinched them in half, and smeared them on their nails,

then ran through pine-dark woods, waving their hands.

All I could hear was laughter, shouts. And all

that I could see for each one of my sons

were ten blurs of faint, artificial light,

never too far apart, and trembling.

Like fairies, magic, sprites, they ran and shouted.

"I'm not real! I'm not real!"  The whole world fell

away from me—perhaps I was still drunk -

as on the night Titania told dazed Bottom,

"Put off your human grossness so, and like

an airy spirit go." But even then

the night could not hold long against the light,

and light destroys roots, fog, lies, orchids, night,

dawn stars, the moon, delusions, and most magic.

And light sends into hiding owls, fireflies,

and bats, whom for their unerring blunder, I

adore the most of all night fliers. But owls,

hid in a hickory, will hoot all day,

and even the moon persists, like my hangover,

some days till almost noon, drifting above

the harsh, bright, murderous morning light—so blue,

so valuable, so much like currency

that if the moon were my blue coin, I'd never spend it.

© Andrew Hudgins

In Upholding Mystery,

An Anthology of

Contermporary Poetry,

Edited by David Impastato,

Oxford University Press,

1997, pages 72-74

photo by William Abranowicz