September 2015
I was born in Denver, Colorado, on the westernmost edge of the Great Plains, and I’ve always responded to and aspired to a quality in poetry that I can only call “clarity.” Not that I’m interested in clarity at the expense of honest complexity; after all, light is not always benign: it blinds as often as it reveals, as anyone who’s grown up in my part of the world would know. That duality fascinates me and continues to shape my work. I’ve published 16 collections of poems over the years, most recently The Satire Lounge (just out from Folded Word), Marked Men, and Thread of the Real, and in September 2014 Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper appointed me to a four-year term as Colorado Poet Laureate. I teach for the University of Denver’s University College, where I also direct two graduate degree programs, and live with my wife Melody in the foothills southwest of Denver.
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Crayoned Rainbow
Susi, age three for Susi, 30-some years later— Across the gray-white, blue-lined paper sky, her crayoned rainbow sweeps. Under it, egg-shaped figures totter—scribbled green with swirled orange eyes, or blue with brown mouths and legs like twists of thin smoke. Fatherly, I ponder the teachable scene and point. Who’s that? That’s the Daddy. I point again. This one? (Tiny at the tether end of the Daddy’s long arm— her baby brother, maybe.) Is this the son? No! Frowning. That’s a girl. And this? (Up in the clouds. It looks like a Frisbee.) Is it a Frisbee? She half snorts, half sighs. That’s—the girl’s—hat, then adds a few scribbles to clarify its hatness. A hat, I say. In the sky, I say. Did someone throw it there? She dons her patience face. That’s her hat she’s dreamin' about. I admit: sometimes wonder takes me, and I see she’s a miracle happening in secret— the way mist-laden air unlocks the colors occulted in sunlight, lofting them out over the Earth, above our heads— as her sketch explains. I tell her, The Daddy looks a little sad. Her eyebrows knit around a new thought. ’Cause he don’t have a hat. But look at the flowers! Pretty, I say. They’re all the colors of the rainbow. Now she grants a quick smile. That girl growed those rainbow flowers for her Dad. |
©2015 Joseph Hutchison