Five Poems by Joseph Hutchison

 

The Bear King

What happened to those squeaks of chalk
that accompanied my childhood ABCs? Wee
shrieks that might have made even Webern
wince. My kids missed out, knew just the lisp
of dry-erase markers on whiteboards, where
(so I told them) polar bears lived. I told

how every day the great Bear King
peered from his palace of ice, bemused
by the scarlet threads of walrus blood
scrawled across the glittering tundra,
a sacred script he'd never learned to read.
Did he give up? He did not! He leaned

from his ice-bound throne, straining
to understand … but in the end lapsed
into a worried dream that found him
gazing like Moses at the Promised Land.
Then my kids’ teacher swept the board
with his eraser, and a rush of wind

plucked off the King’s sealskin crown,
and his burly guards snickered. The thanks
I get, he moaned—a contrabassoon-ish note
my kids didn’t hear: their eyelids, grown
heavy, were shuttering down as Mr. Baedeker
moved on from grammar to long division.

 

Sweetgrass

A boy mis-ripened by childhood
arrives at maturity immature.
Like a green plum
with a wind-clipped stem,
he drops into the spring grass.

One day a woman
lifts him up, bites
into him, spits out
a lump of bitterness,
lets him drop.

What became of my
sweetness? he wonders. What
filled me with bitterness?
All while swaddled in the lush
sweetgrass of summer.

 

St. Vitus’ Dance

It seems some prankster spliced our movie’s
leader to its tail. Kept in the loop, we keep
replaying it, bleary-eyed and bemused,

keep picking the story apart to find out why
what comes next comes next. More and more
frequently the loop stutters, burns in a brownish

flare, then snaps—and whosoever’s in control
summons from home the dim projectionist
to make yet one more splice. So many years,

so many multiplying joins infest our viewing,
the sudden gaps and the jumpy tête-à-têtes
making us wonder if time’s turned erratic,

has stopped being real. Of course, we sense
the truth of it when our sharpest memories
start to flicker like an old man’s eyelids,

maybe Uncle Bill’s, dead but still dear,
whose bout of St. Vitus’ Dance as a child
left him haplessly blinking at the bitter end.

 

Ode to Worn Wood

Do we really need
to strip this worn
oak paneling
to paint it? Or
might priming it
be enough? It’s only
wainscoting, after all,
not a real wall. The real
wall's hidden: sheets
of plasterboard nailed
tight to studs,
and behind them
the pink
cotton candy
insulation,
snarled wiring,
spider nests, black
rice the mice
have dropped behind
like breadcrumbs
in a folktale.
                     Maybe
better to leave this
worn wood
as is, so we don’t
forget it once was
a deep-rooted
being, unlike
us (“the roving
species,” Ponge
puts it).
             Let’s
let the tips of our
fingers now and then
trace the braille
of this grain,
bringing
to mind the water
that climbed inside
the needle-thin
veins, taproot
to trunk, moistening
branches, twigs,
freshening leaves
by the thousands, leaves
that night and day
released their healing
mist for creatures
such as us to breathe
in, out in
the open air.

 

A Shining Cloud

Water trickles out from under the snowfield.
Here and there grass bristles up, furiously green.
Even the mind feels soaked and cold, the sun
reddening banks of cloud above the downhill city.
Each breath emerges in its own cloud, unravels away.

*

Toward midday the sun has sloughed off the clouds—
heroically, it seems, although its light is meager.
Earthworms in ones and twos lengthen on the mud,
probably dreaming of being reborn as taut cello strings.
I walk by Russian olive trees, thorny as Dostoevsky,
no hint of leaves, a truculence—noli me tangere….

 

*

Yesterday snow stormed over the westward peaks,
over the valleys, grainy flakes like white poppy seeds.
Now they huddle together in wet heaps and clumps,
such quiet desperation … such cold fear of being
transformed into water that moves and changes,
refusing hardness and clarity, preferring the blurred
undercurrents where fish can hover, gills pulsing.

 

*

Nothing ’round midnight flows but the west wind,
kin to earthbound water, but the cold can’t check its
drive into Tallgrass, Black Mesa, the billowy Sandhills.
I sit at a west-facing window, a faint lamp lit. Blunt
violent gusts make me flinch, draw back … although
I know the window is hard and clear, sure to hold….
Dream voices thunder anyway against the glass, angry,
evangelical. I flick the lamp off. Up high, a milky cloud—:

 

*

Star-springs pouring light into the parched throat of darkness!

Joseph Hutchison has published eight collections of poems, most recently Under Sleep's New Moon and The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015. His twelfth chapbook, Cliff Swallow At Mesa Verde, is just out from Middle Creek Publishing. Joe’s poems have appeared widely in journals—most recently in the 20th anniversary issue of Cutthroat, Tar River Poetry, The Berlin Review, and Poetry Salzburg Review—and in numerous anthologies, including A Ritual To Read Together: Poems In Conversation With William Stafford and Begin Where You Are: The Colorado Poets Laureate Anthology. He served as Colorado Poet Laureate from 2014 to 2019 and now teaches at the University of Denver. He lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, his native city.