June 2017
Joseph Hutchison
poetjhwriter@icloud.com
poetjhwriter@icloud.com
I live near Denver, where I was born, and although I enjoy travel, I’d rather be home. Every day I look out the same windows at a world that’s never the same. This explains why there’s so little in my poems that is picturesque or exotic: their strangeness is home-grown. My images and the noises my words make seem as peculiar to me as they must to my readers, probably because they’ve arrived from the part of me that dreams, the part that lives in a faraway place to which I’ve never traveled. My poems seem to have traveled a long way to whisper their truest lies to me, and for some reason, or no reason, I feel it’s my duty to write them down—which may be the strangest part of all.
Illumination at Midnight
Beat from wrestling a stubborn poem,
words all thick red clay, he shuffles
in sock feet across the bedroom’s
carpeted darkness, groping to find
the floor lamp’s chain of beads. Now
his finger sparks, and the bulb drinks up
his body’s charge, flares, winks out—
leaving this fading afterimage:
Adam sprawled on the Chapel sky,
drunk as a lord, his limp left hand
lifted toward the hand that made him;
but failing, failing ... he sinks back,
his listing head and cloudy gaze
lost beneath a cockeyed lampshade.
Beat from wrestling a stubborn poem,
words all thick red clay, he shuffles
in sock feet across the bedroom’s
carpeted darkness, groping to find
the floor lamp’s chain of beads. Now
his finger sparks, and the bulb drinks up
his body’s charge, flares, winks out—
leaving this fading afterimage:
Adam sprawled on the Chapel sky,
drunk as a lord, his limp left hand
lifted toward the hand that made him;
but failing, failing ... he sinks back,
his listing head and cloudy gaze
lost beneath a cockeyed lampshade.
©2017 Joseph Hutchison