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

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

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

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

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

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

​

​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

​

​

​

​

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

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)

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

Gifted



It felt more important to have a darling and children
Than to live a story.
We have vignettes
of love and work and study.

I tried hard to be good.
I had to make up for the gifts that god, the fairies, or genetics did not give me.

What is certainly true except vignettes?
You my love have been compassionate and brave.

I think the names
Of love, courage, compassion, diligence, honour,
and some others as if they were gods.



Paul Anthony Hutchinson
wow.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson

THE PONIES IN SNOW PARK


Under flapping green and white awnings
On a wide Toronto street I feel your gloved hand on my tweed coat.
You are cold. We run. It is one o'clock, winter afternoon.
Waiting for the car to warm up we touch mouths and tongues.

This is what I always wanted. We are young. We are wearing
Our favourite clothes. The green and orange plastic pennons
Of the service station slap in the wind.  The ponies stand
Far away, at the edge of the woods in Snow Park.

Some bear their share of the burden of the meaning of life
More easily than others. I know that
When you are alone you must build walls
And figure ways to smash them down.

I know how some mouths opened over you
Like Borgia rings over a wineglass, and how, therefore, it was
Hard for you to abandon the problem many of us loved:
How can I avoid doing harm; how can I avoid harm?

Out of the changes in human emotion,
Out of the changes in faces and lives,
You took the power to do with me what once
You might have done for sadness, or for love, alone.

Our shape refuses depression.
I point at birds. There is music on the radio.
I grin and hug. A few silver minutes now
Of ponies, music, dull orange breast feathers.

                              Paul Anthony Hutchinson

This poem was published in WAVES
pahutchinson@icloud.com
Copyright  Paul Anthony Hutchinson
  www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

This happened to Malcolm

My sister Hadley hosed green stuff off the ***.

When she squirted my ear I ****** the neck rope. Her skin was hurt so

The horse folded back her lips and bit my thigh with brown yellow teeth.

I was thirteen. I locked myself in the bathroom.

I felt ***** as a smug prayer for running. Mom said,

“Come back out. Don’t get left behind.” My dad had run away.

I splashed my face cold and put on my jeans. I hustled out. Not for my mother.

Scottie was a Brock University girl from PEI who cut and doctored hooves and skin

And shod horses and filed their teeth. You could smell teeth filings and Stockholm tar

And when I went back to the head she held my face

A long time in her hands and said I knew you were a straight arrow.

That might have scared my mom.

That was the first time I ever did it with anyone.




Paul Anthony Hutchinson

LAUREL AND THE MARE

It was spring and Southern Ontario air tasted of trees.
A pregnant mare escaped to the woods from her prison on the estrogen farm.
She had long, curled hooves and cracked skin.
She came to Laurel and her two children at the edge of Beamsville.
Laurel had no work, a jumble of painted canvasses in the porch, her father's
Hired man's stucco cottage. Laurel, Hadley, Malcolm wore ski jackets and jeans.
The horse loved to exercise at night in the yard.
They combed her and gave her oats. They couldn't afford a vet so they

Called a farrier horse dentist and she fixed the skin and hooves and filed the teeth.
They hung a trouble light on a nail and talked to the horse at night.
The farm smelled of animal again: you know the power of grass breath.
They read library horse books and what's left of the family
Sang with the radio in the barn. Those might have been holy days,
They were feast days, and the children were pulled away from
American television by the strong and willing horse.

Torn French bread and good cheap Beamsville Magnotta wine on the picnic table,
Wine for the children, too, and they all read in their beds after dark.
Laurel went to bed thinking: "It's La Vie Boheme for us."
She gloated at the return of ******
Feeling and the possibility of love and laughed her
Coarse, sweet, hee-haw laugh.

        Paul Anthony Hutchinson    
This poem was published in Canadian Poetry

A hymn to the goddess of  victory

I won. I stayed near home
And worked and helped my folks.

You were afraid of boredom.
I like working.

I married Pretty Red Wing.

It’s true, the sun shines down on Pretty Red Wing.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

Talk to Anna

(This poem was published may 2002, shadow voices)


Anna's conversation mixes respect and mockery so that
You can’t talk to her without also knowing
Her father, who loved to read and drink,
A man who broke free without running away.

There was a talking devil in her house.
Read Socrates and shudder when you know
The defeat of a thoughtful child's intellect.

There is delight in hard practice.
Much that you can do deliberately covers up
Having known a talking devil.
You can apologize when you are sarcastic.

She adored a twenty year old man.
He had mastered being young in grooming and talking.
The skills you once wanted are known to him.
I mean that he pretended to be exciting.

She is one of us; she wants friends and love.
She falters being with people.
She knew a talking devil.
She knew a pretending devil.


            Paul Anthony Hutchinson
paulanthonyhutchinson.com
pahutchinson@icloud.com

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