Cave Painting
Prof. Jeanine Kowalski, PhD, Anthropology:
“I write until very late in my parents’ farmhouse, in my old bedroom.
I am visiting at Thanksgiving, writing my research.  
I love my parents, to be here, my work.

“When I was seventeen, here, in my childhood bedroom,
Threatened with boredom, which my parents implied was the Prince of Darkness,
And to be fair I believed it myself, independently,
I did not honour the life and love commitment I made to a seventeen year old boy.
I gave up, temporarily, the love-courage of girls.

“The combine harvester working by floodlight in the field outside this room, is harvesting soybeans while I write.
The man who was that boy is driving the combine harvester at night, harvesting his parents’ crop, helping his parents.
He is driving back and forth by tractor floodlight and headlights and the headlights of the trucks aimed up the rows.

“I do not have to live without love or happiness or beloved children.
I am pretty, too. I got most of the gifts.
He has a wife and children and a life of his own.
If I was treacherous, I am, I am sure, forgiven, but still,
After even the fullest and truest justification, you must look at the thing itself,
Just the thing itself ….

“And to do that I would need the kind of love poetry which is hardest to find, the love poetry which is all we have left
Of the great art of cave painting, poetry not drawing its power from melancholy, but shining with wanting, with excitement and awe.
He had, of all the gifts, character.”

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson

Evening daubs of ox-blood, pipe dottle, rust.
The lakeshore and the bonfire and the trees stammer,
Pleasure mutters, in turpentined and transparent voices
Like many invisible things, intermittently believed:

The taste of my darling's knees, her summer dress,
Her strong, fresh, friendly kisses,
The smell of garden dirt and fireworks,
Magnesium flare and  copper flare on the matte sky:
Like doubt and the lovely end of doubt.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
pahutchinson@icloud.com

St. Catharines light in the afternoon: lead oxide, pink white, dry mud shadows.
They lay on her living room carpet and Anthony gloated over Milly
Her cotton nightgown, her long back, and round shoulders: proof at last.
"So this is gloating. It is better to gloat than to doubt. It took me a long time."

Her clean faded quilt brought from the balcony rail: it
Smells of clean laundry and cold air and the thrill of their power.
He’s proud to be the lover of a heroine,
And happy that he can see her this way.”

Picnic kisses tasting of smoked oysters and beer.
There were never friendly kisses of love before?
"Milly, I love hearing how you defied the adults."

He told Hansel and Gretel to her child, who had strep throat,
And told it again, knowing it would work,

Seeing the bookshelves, seeing her notebooks,
Knowing that he would have his life after all:

                      The mispronounced words of a solitary reader,
                       The red skirt on the chair, the gold necklace of coins.


                   Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson

Pictures on the Cave Wall





I look for the humility and pride I want in doubt

When I can only look there.

I close my eyes. Help me pray like a man. Not like a fool.

Accept my doubt and my self-conscious blessings and



My rote mumbled grace. Give me a chance.
I know  I can be good.

Plato saw shadows on the cave wall. They said something somewhere else is pure.
I saw bright painted animals. I will go with the hunters and their dogs.

I want a fire and food and love and

I want to hear the love story again,
Or the friend story:



I’m 17, back in the boys’ bathroom at high school, punching and kicking

Andrew Fane, who hit Colleen so hard and often.  I didn’t know.

She was my friend.

For months I didn’t know. How stupid. He humiliated Colleen, she crawled,

She was my friend and that is more than a saint for me.


  
She was  my friend and this is more than a saint for me and for many like me.
Save me from the coarse things all men are offered.


I will do the right thing.

Help me guess the right thing.

​Paul Anthony Hutchinson
pahutchinson@icloud.com
www.pahutchinson.com
Copyright­ Paul Anthony Hutchinson