Submit your work, meet writers and drop the ads. Become a member
 
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
Love and artists and creativity
They Were Children Together

I remember her white poet shirt and clean clear face.
She is on stage at the Mansion House, a St. Catharines bar:
Songs she wrote and songs learned from the radio
Brag of coarse and earthy evenings.
She sang, “…when I’m drunk I’m a nihilist…”

She jokes that her life is a documentary limerick.
She has two children.
She’s the eager daughter of rich peasants.
Impulse, defiance, insults, she defends as truth and a joke.

“I’m going to tell him you’re his father,”
She said to her best  friend while I listened.
“You don’t have to pay.
I told my parents you’re the father”
And while he cried she said:
“You could make everything all right for me.”


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

(this poem was published May 2002 in Shadow Voices)
A love poem and a friend poem.
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
A love poem, a compressed novel not melancholy. The Greeks wrote hymns to victory .....
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
Next page