Ishion Hutchinson Poems

A furnace in my father's voice; I prayed for the coal stove's
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle
...

After the hurricane walks a silence, deranged, white as the white helmets
of government surveyors looking into roofless

shacks, accessing stunned fowls, noting inquiries
into the logic of feathers, reversed, like gullies still retching; they scribble facts

about fallen cedars, spread out like dead generals on leaf
medallions; they draw tables to show the shore

has rearranged its idea of beauty for the resort
villas, miraculously not rattled by the hurricane's -

call it Cyclops - passage through the lives
of children and pigs, the one eye that unhooked

banjos from the hills, smashed them in Rio Valley;
they record how it howled off to that dark parish

St. Thomas, stomping drunk with wire lashes and cramps,
paralyzing electric poles and coconut trees,

dishing discord among neighbours, exposed,
standing among their flattened, scattered lives for the first time.

It passed through Aunt May's head, upsetting
the furniture, left her chattering something,

a cross between a fowl and a child; they can't say
how it tore down her senses, no words, packing

their instruments, flies returning to genuflect
at their knees, on Aunt May's face, gone soft;

no words, except: Don't fret, driving off,
as if they had left better promises to come.
...

History is dismantled music; slant,
bleak on gravel. One amasses silence,
another chastises silence with nettles,
stinging ferns. I oscillate in their jaws.

The whole gut listens. The ear winces
white nights in his talons: sinking mire.
He wails and a comet impales the sky
with the duel wink of a wasp's burning.

Music dismantles history; the flambeaux
inflame in his eyes with a locust plague,
a rough gauze bolting up his mouth unfolds,
so he lashes the air with ropes and roots

that converge on a dreadful zero,
a Golden Age. Somewhere, an old film.
Dusk solders on a cold, barren coast. There
I am a cenotaph of horns and stones.
...

1

I circled half-mad a dead azalea scent that framed
my room; I licked anointed oil off a sardine tin,

opened Being and Time, perplexed myself, then picked up
and blew a clay bird whistle, silence came scratching,

the same way it did at the funeral of Heidegger,
when no silence came.



2

When my boy-self played séance in the Spanish
needles, havocking the bees, their bronze staining

my shanks, rain pistils sprung out of the earth and buried
glass splinters under my clothesline. Vivaldi and tangerine

below the early winter moon minting its double
over the city axled down in the buried sea's lilac

silver trimming my window wick with the fierce,
fast and low rustle of lions out of a russeted ice floe.



3

A furnace in my father's voice; I prayed for the coal-stove's
roses, a cruise ship lit like a castle

on fire in the harbour we never walked;
father and son, father drifting down the ferned hell his shanty shone, where,

inside, in my head, the lamp was the lamp.
The market, the park, the library not a soul

but grandmother's morning wash lifting towards heaven,
her flapping winding sheets; the barrister sun punished my sister, I stared at my hand

in a book, the horizon declined in my mouth, a hawk's scream tied all the hills together.
My little earth-shaker, visored in placenta, wonder of

wonders, tremulous in amniotic
shield, ensoulled already, father in the veritable

night, without house or harbour,
soon sea in a voice will harrow

a scorpion's blaze in me, to the marrow.



4

At night birds hammered my unborn
child's heart, each strike bringing bones

and spine to glow, her lungs pestled
loud as the sea I was raised a sea anemone

among women who cursed their hearts
out, soured themselves, never-brides,

into veranda shades, talcum and tea moistened
their quivering jaws, prophetic without prophecy.

Anvil-black, gleaming garlic nubs, the pageant arrived with sails unfurled
from Colchis and I rejoiced like a broken

asylum, to see burning sand grains, skittering ice;
shekels clapped in my chest, I smashed my head against a lightbulb

and light sprinkled my hair; I rejoiced, a poui
tree hit by the sun in the room, a man, a man.



5

The sky is loaded with ore, the mountains
the mountains are lingering on the threshold,

luminous with the valley's pollution. A late transport
shimmers, and I shimmer, too: this is one of the holy cities of America;

holy banks, mortuaries, holy cafés a golden angel
descends in the middle of three javelining spires.

Then I see poised, wraithlike, in the snow,
on the sifted avenue, muscles released from chiaroscuro,

a herd of darkness gathering to passage unto Shiloh,
where the Lord of Summer lives, kindling a coal fire.
...

For Erna Brodber

Be ye my fictions; But her story.
— Richard Crashaw

I can bring a halo
into the night cave, quiet
with music (do not ask the music),

to her shaded there
in the moon; her fine spectacles
steam their pond rings;

her animal eyes fix
on the lintel of the door
as the wax owl glances back at me. I am her little cotton

tree the breeze combs
white into a final note,
her diminuendo poco a poco ...    

Moon-afro, myself
outpaces me
in wonder of her.

She goes off and I seep
under the black sprout
of her house, to rise

a salmon bell on the hill
dissolving mild cloud fractals,
without grief or malice.
...

They flared on the sea green
of the Subaru that seemed netted
under the unleafing maple,

a limestone moulage cut
from a quarry and cast
in immemorial arrest behind

Pete's Absolute Asphalt truck,
throttling still when I alighted
and said, besides, in Aleppo once —

to nothing but the wind
photographed in sunlight;
the pavement's watery brier

and children and their ghosts
and the air-raid screams of mothers,
once, in Aleppo, altered

that moment in history
when titihihihihi titihihihihi
those white houses,

stiffened with silence, broke
the private change, the public good
to dive into pits of leaves.
...

At nights birds hammered my unborn
child's heart to strength, each strike bringing
...

Brailed up from birth, these obdurate, obituary corners
of second life the hospital light ravened solstice
...

Lesson of the day: Syria and Styria.
For Syria, read: His conquering banner shook from Syria.
And for Styria: Look at this harp of  blood, mapping.
...

The old trees shake out medals at midday
to the ship paused for a meteor's blunting
glimpse in the windy yellow of the water,
...