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

I'll eat fried bologna sandwiches
and drink your watered down whiskey
Give me cotton sheets and cheap concert
seats
Morning biscuits and gravy ,
A Chilton and a wrench ,
A tractor and a plow
Good old fashioned hand to tool
" know how*"

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

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

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)