Cynthia Hogue Poems

After months of study and debris
leaders inebriate with the findings
lose faith. They criss-cross the land like pollen, hovering,
wavering: Are we rooted yet? Are we grown?
Everyone sighs as the possible sweeps past the clutter.

It's tragic, carrying seeds of hope when whole forests
wilt cacophonously
and drought reigns. Tensions rise like welts, red black and blue
reasons bobbing about like parti-colored helium balloons.

We found the gash right away.
The Colonel wept: his wife had called
demanding he tell the truth or she'd jump with their child.
Once I, too, rushed from a plane believing
I'd meet my love resplendent in furs, with open, rendez-vous arms.

But truly he could not speak.
She stood on the brink, impractical, needless
as exterminating nature because the white-tailed deer
breed ticks and taxpayers
protest. For a time, so deft at denying,

he convinced her the chasm a ditch and the road long
since overgrown with red oak and sweet gum.
Gummy saplings edged with sticky broomstick pine.
The wide blue air of the wild blue sky.
...

adapted from a 2004 issue of St. Petersburg Times


Saturday evening the tempest passed, but the bay still rose, its shoreline invisible, lost. On Sunday, the waters withdrew. People saw dry land. On Monday, those waters roared back, crashing over balustrades onto the boulevard. Meteorologists warned of winds causing a storm surge, which, during the night, snuck in like a cat and crept toward Cynthia Hogue's house on Ballast Point. Her sandbags, placed against all doors, slept on as the water inched closer, then seeped in through cracks and crevices. Cynthia Hogue, 69, woke to stand knee-deep in water and was not sanguine. Glancing out the window as a boatload of teenagers rowed by sending havoc in their wake, she said, 'I wish they'd get stuck.' Water rippled inside her home.

'I have fought this for years and years,' Cynthia Hogue said. "Don't drain the wetlands," I argued. "Birds need them. We need them. We do not need resorts. We do not need casinos."

Elements lay strewn across her bed. Among the gold, the copper, the seaborgium, the tungsten, were notebooks from Hogue's ongoing fight with officials about coastal marshlands and hurricanes. 'The storms come and no one listens to me. I feel like dancing in them,' she said. 'What else can I do? I've tried everything else depending on truth.'

But as she waded through her home on Ballast Point, Hogue decided not to count on truth anymore.
...

Elle's writing her book of wisdom.
She writes until she cannot hold her pen.
The labyrinth miraculously is uncovered.

An American woman's progressing on her knees.
She read something but not Elle's book.
No one will read Elle's book.

I walk the circular path, first the left side,
then the right, casting petals to the north,
east, south, and west (this intuitively).

A diminutive prelate shoos me away.
When he leaves, I return to the center.
The organist, practicing, strikes up Phantom.

Elle says she cannot hear him.
Elle! I cry, I cannot see you.
I had prayed Death spare you.

Remember our meal among the termites
of Arcadia Street, that cottage of spirits
with its riddled beams and long veranda

bordered by plantain trees, and the spiral
you traced for me on scrap-paper?
I kept it for such a long time.

The organist, of course, is playing Bach.
A boy has scattered the petals I threw.
Elle's voice surrounds me.

The quiet hills I lift mine eyes.
...

There was an ancient well-site beneath the labyrinth
I did not reach, the part underground,
labeled (what else?) The Crypt.

But labels always hide something
about what they seem to define.
They set the thing apart

without disclosing why.
Alive costs a pretty penny
to see The Crypt now.
...

Everything looped, spiraled, circular (thought)
But the labyrinth's not a maze but a singular way
to strike "the profoundest chord"
across aspire

Those who enter the labyrinth can leave
(pilgrims sometime don't)
(Elle did not)
Inside the largest circle

(the labyrinth itself)
splits into equal parts
(demi-arcs or waves)
No, silly, Elle whispers, petals

If measured through the centre of the petals there should be two parts for each
petal and one for the entry, but calculations from the measurements show that
this is not so. The difference is about ½". There is no way around this problem.

We must seek a solution
to the geometry of petals,
the consequential mystery
of Elle's message:

I was sick and am not
healed. I am not blind
but dead. I am not dead
but silenced. Alone, in love.
...

after an Icelandic folktale in which an elf child
is exchanged for a human one

Loftur. His name means air,
and my cries
wend up to him,
floating
on the currents
of afterbirth, the veil

of second sight
still wrapped around his head.
You mean wind.
Husband, I know what I named him.
He witnessed his own birth;
it caught his breath

like a raven swooping to catch a berry
as it drops from the bush.
When a cold front moved off sea,
to the ring of mountains-
everything gave way to stillness
I could not escape.

His first impulse was flight
out from under this lid
toward another vision,
but was he blind to the one we have?
You mean storm, brewing around us,
had he waited to ride it out?

I mean this child left to me, without cowl,
breath gone from him,
no cry issued,
nothing for me to nurture.
By now he's back there,
knew where to go-

his hand extended to grasp
the forerunner's, and when they touch,
all the dark feathered beings will rivet
the air with their calls and I'll
shudder through root and stone.
You mean rain

will come soon.
This time, I will follow.
They are brothers now
someone else must raise.
...

(reading Robert Duncan in Haldon Forest)
bloom looks
like lupine from afar
but up close the small bell-
like flowers of wild hollyhock

the holy that forth
came that must

come mystery
of frond fern
gorse a magic
to which I

relate to
land of hillock and

bolder the grayer
sky and wood
the straight flat One
between them barred

by the bushy Scots pine
medicinal veridian of ever-

green which though
gossip rumor spell
or chance change us
is not changed
...

The labyrinth maintained for years
by troth of those who built it
greened fast when they stopped.

Where do you start
to bring it back
when it's gone
to seed?
Indeed
the labyrinth's exemplary
of the idiom, its pathway untrod,

its name forgot. Though the forest
grow over it, you might, after all, find
your way if, as is still said, troth's a force.
...

When you aren't here
and I call you to mind,
can you hear me?

I conjure a character flush
with flesh, your name as
sign of your life apart,

but have no sense
of whom I address.
Let me ask you: who who who?

Looking for you,
I wander through a dark wood,
a grove, a crowd

of trees, so many I at last
give you world enough
and time to never be found:

Can you see
that giving another something -
let's say you hours among trees

with the space they need
to make the poison choking us
into a potion healing all -

is an example of the gift without
strings, though you may think
there will always be strings?
...

Only for you will I finish a story
that keeps you on edge, (boundary
holding your ring finger,
watching my hands curve and -

swans on a pond - arms rise presumed, exposed:
and open as in embrace.
Touched? Here are
some air kisses:

Smooch. Smooch.
Before you, the city's dark.
Streets wind labyrin-
thine. Now go home: not only more pointed but

the place in which (I know)
you feel in danger,
for words, fear-full, wound.
I say, Change that. impermanent:)
...