Young Music
Before spring, near Grimsby, ditches run clean like trout streams,
Our vines are gray. They will be pink next, like flushed, excited skin.
In March there is the flatness that is a big part of trouble.
Anthony's sisters are helping him scrub his apartment.
He was sick all winter. They raise his laughter like neighbours raise a burned out barn.
He had made a good start. The therapy.
He says now, "I wasn't so much sick as sad all the time."
The pills ended the depression. You can wish that life was never mechanical.
Smell of hot vinegar in the coffee-maker, smells of pine oil and beer.
Brock University jackets, damp curly hair, his sisters
Wiping their hands on sweatshirts, the open window,
His bedroom. Anthony clears books from the sills and cleans and shines the windows.
There are wicker baskets for their picnic and for his laundry.
I always wanted to know, what is consecration?
(Here is a scrap of his poetry:
"... ******* the colour of a driftwood campfire.")
His sisters laugh to think of a girl in the apartment.
The ***** clothes are gone. He's got clean denims and hiking boots.
Laughter, beer and young music,
Bread and stew and pickles and heavy brown two liter bottles of beer
On the white wooden kitchen table where he hopes to write.
His father's pickup truck is in the yard, its bed full of garbage.
With cleaning any good thing can happen. The sisters feel it too.
I didn't know what consecration meant. They joked
That he could have a girl up there when they were done.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Brook Trout Press
Grimsby and Toronto, Ontario, Canada
May 21, 2022
May 21, 2022 at 9:55 PM UTC
I committed to be one for whom
The work and food and bed were blessed
Until they were.
Say the grace you can pray for and get:
Ask for courage and character.
Ask for a sign:
I saw your short nightgown, green as a mallard’s head.
I saw the sign of the shining bed.
I had doubt bad
Until one lay down.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Brook Trout Press
Jul 3, 2021
Jul 3, 2021 at 11:09 PM UTC
This was The Clue of the Snake in the Hollow Book.
It’s only a vignette...the one where aggressive, friendly
Middle aged men walk Larissa to her car. She is calmer.
She likes to hear us talk about farming and carpentry.
Her first love is ruined for her by beatings.
Glenn and I were her guards in spring and summer
Before and after work through P&G factory parking in Hamilton.
What does this mean now: Larissa? For us,
A thrill: young, smart, loving, flushed and excited; with
The exhaustion of giving more than she had.
It meant beauty and living with a beautiful boy:
She loved his fierce flatness and fiery boredom.
Night classes at McMaster University
She asks another student to walk her to her car.
She says, “Before this happened I was headed for medical school.”
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinon.com
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
May 20, 2020
May 20, 2020 at 10:22 PM UTC
The Clue of the Shining Farm
You go to a party and hear Ludovic’s trees
And his stream in the night like The Trout Stream.
Take inside the long pine barnboard table: new bread, roast chickens, a goose.
Just rip them apart, they’re jammed with apples and sugar-tasting brown onions. Drink Beer, drink Beamsville, his Baco Noir that tastes like jam and barnyard dirt.
Crops his neighbours dig or pick are cooked in fire or just scrubbed under the tap and laid on planks on sawhorses. New speckled eggs from cages behind the garage:
His bonfire is a hundred thousand years old.
The bonfire where older faces glow like blush and blood. The nuzzling Belgian horse, The Labrador as good as the best you ever...
Home of Ludovic the life-loving,
Whom you know to have outlived fatal humiliation and fatal defeat.
A shining friend from a brutal family,
Exciting when he has exciting plans,
Repetition, repetition, repetition, when you are not looking. Two women left him. It is a secret...
If you were there with your sweetheart she’d be pretty excited
To be with you, she’d be happy with artists and writers and poets... Ludwig: not a genius; a powerful and important almoner.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
Feb 1, 2020
Feb 1, 2020 at 10:56 PM UTC
The nights
It feels so good to think and read,
It feels so good to work and sleep.
You are lucky to be loved as a girl loves a horse.
You are the ribbons in the mane of her love of life.
Days with her will wash your face.
Her words and love are the strategies of
One who was a thoughtful child.
You were troubled, flat and eager..
It feels so good to work and sleep.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Apr 11, 2019
Apr 11, 2019 at 5:15 PM UTC
I borrowed an archetype: one
I could not have loved without,
Not Joan of Arc on fire, another
Miracle imagined girl,
In my mind when I was born.
Red cheeks and red nose, like an apple cheeked doll:
Lots of alcohol.
The Kind Little Girl,
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
paulanthonyhutchinson.com
Dec 13, 2013
Nov 3, 2018
Nov 3, 2018 at 10:38 PM UTC
Laurel promises if you pay child support
None of your money will go for sick horses.
I don’t care what you think or feel about guns.
I laugh at everything you believe
And I won’t tell you if it’s true that your son Malcolm shot my 12 gauge double
Or if I gave his mom the .410
For a house gun.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Aug 3, 2017
Aug 3, 2017 at 11:47 PM UTC
I saw Stewart and Maud under a locust tree in Kensington market.
They had new bicycles. She leaned her sweaty, curly head on his bicep.
They had baguettes, flowers, asparagus and apples from the farm booths in their packs,
Buzet and Minervois from the liquor store, library books. They had life-loving things.
He says that for him this new life is instead of being an artist in Paris:
Backpacks, bicycles, the look of young lovers. The little possessions
That don't feel like a car or a house. They are wearing bright white t shirts
And denim overalls. His children are confused. They have little money.
He joined the many who have refused to be punished for a mistake.
My friend Stewart lives with a university student.
You get to their Annex apartment up iron stairs bolted to the
Outside of a building of old brick coloured like a driftwood campfire. The bed's iron.
She's been an adult for seven years. Iron, bricks, flowers, white iron bed,
Stewart has the skills to make it good, he's done this before, made the Muskoka
Chairs, the harvest tables, and sold them, repaired window frames and doors,
Advertised in supermarkets. He likes to breathe, to drink water, to cut wood and dress it,
To study, to read, to live well with a woman, to write in the evening, to make life like art.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Apr 26, 2017
Apr 26, 2017 at 10:52 PM UTC
The free ones and the ones who have fates are all mixed together
Tired happy and excited or
Wry, humble, eager.
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Mar 17, 2017
Mar 17, 2017 at 8:53 PM UTC
A Spring Evening in Paris with the Thieves of Love
They found each other in the good samaritan way you would try.
If you are not alluring, if you can’t get a reverie, there are other ways.
Ellen was drunk and left alone near St.Severin off the Rue de la Harpe
Where you can smell butter and garlic and mussels and iodine
From bistros open to the street. Anthony loved it that you could see that
Those bistros were happy and good. He wanted to be in one with a girl.
Ellen in mottled lamplight on the churchyard cobbles:
Freckled, brown eyed, strong in clean denim overalls and white T-shirt.
She knelt there sick and knelt also inside Anthony, in a lyric:
Not many chances like this in life. He nursed her
To her place in Billancourt. She was afraid on the Metro.
A drunken kiss of thanks at her door tastes of sickness and anise.
Of course he came back. A real man would come back for more thanks.
If it was his first chance in months.
She was brave, dramatically friendly, often in
The light that passes for candles on stage.
She had the fierce compassion that terrifies.
He had been disqualified from girls by anxiety.
They bought food, flowers and wine in the market
And walked and bought books from bouquinistes
And cooked in her room. He wrote at her table.
The white iron bed by the sunny window...
Who was this girl no older than Anthony,
Showing him friendship, making him grateful,
Showing him love,
" I like to do this,
Find one that I love, make something perfect."
Sneaky good love of stealth and cunning...
Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Nov 3, 2016
Nov 3, 2016 at 11:37 PM UTC