Passing along some Hugh Fox poems

These poems are going into the Juice online 2006 issue, but I thought I'd put them out there in my blog first, sort of in the tradition of hyperzine; everything linking and circling.

Best,
Stephen Morse

*******************


OK, my friend, here are a few poems with the same common denominator, DEATH. All very recent:


KISSING

Kissing my wife goodnight, the words “Little
old lady” come unconditionally and unwanted into
my head, I tell her, then add, “And I like it,
you as an old lady,” “Up to a point,” “No (her
arthritis crippling her, metabolism problems, urinating
too much, dying her hair twice a week, trouble
getting up and down stairs) , all the way,” another kiss,
I leave her, “Hope to see you in the morning,” never
quite sure I will, loving the idea of us aging,living
and dying together, TIL DEATH US DO  (NEVER!)
PART.


DEATH AGAIN


All day/night like a dog following me,
sunlight, shadow, wind, moonlight, 
Not long now, the days getting shorter
an hour a month now, Kaddish, remember
the dead, I was better off believing in Death
and Resurrection, instead of “Those who sleep
in the dust,” not that belief has anything to do
with
Reality.



BACK



Going back, back, back to the clouds and the
cypresses and smoke,trees, mouldering twigs
and edge-of-dusk bats, skunk-smells,wild turkeys,
everything wild,  primal, before guns, torahs,
mosques, in the beginning was the sky and you
and I
evolving into the pre-buddistic-
buddhistic
everything
NOW.



ORIGINS

“Let’s go back,” I e-mail  her, a photo of her
lifesize on the wall, waist up, bare tits, “let’s
go back to Ireland, Wales, Scotland, to some
sort of Celtic backflash...,” back at least a few
thousand years, Stonehengeish and primitif,
“I’m Irish, like you,” she writes back, Lo Galluccio,
“my father’s Italian...,” back before the Roman
empire was ever heard of, just the two of us and
the zodiac stars, is there some village somewere in
La Floresta (between the Andes and coast) or in
the mountains themselves where you walk in and
everyone’s (The Apples of Immortality)
immortal?



NUMBERS


Red, pink, blue, white, purple
cotton candy clouds, we’re on the beach
at Lake Lansing when she starts in, “Those
skeletons we saw today in the MSU museum,
I mean dinosaurs and things...,” “A great museum,
isn’t it?,” “But elephants in Kansas 25 million years
ago....how much is twenty-five million years?,”
“It’s one hundred, one thousand, a hundred thousand,
a hundred hundred...,” “And how old are you, grandpa?,”
“Seventy-three.”

                       GLENNA

                         Je comprend le
                         silence,
                         our needs sliding
                         into soft chairs
                         and not much
                         need to move,
                         the passion as
                         soft as clouds,
                         re-assurance, clapping
                         on the back,
                         hugs turning into
                         falling leaves, another
                         cup of soy milk,
                         another oatmeal
                         creme
                         (Je t'adore)
                         cake, facing
                         the idea of the final
                         doors
                         closing.


Hugh Fox