Poetry: Selections From Damon Hubbs
At the Air Show
When I saw
you at the air show
you were
telling some guy with a Fox frame umbrella
that
walnut comes from the Old English walhnuto
which
means “foreign nut.” And the guy looked at you
like you
were off your rocker, and maybe you were
even
though he was the one who thought
a Fox
frame umbrella could protect
him from a
midair collision;
debris
from the pierced heart
formation
took out 70 in West Germany in ’88
and us, in
Montpelier, not so many years ago.
Our base
leg was never sound.
Flying
dirty in the basement apartment,
love like
a blown-out engine, then barrel rolls
as the
flea sucked suddenly at our blood.
O how we
denied each other.
A quick
punch of air from the bedroom window.
Just a
crack, a little crack. Now we see
acorns
gathering, and the mailman’s shoes
fathomless
and black.
A
Weekend in the Catskills
Warring
with wakened birds
and an
active bladder
in the
Catskills with Tom and Gretchen;
they have
an au pair who lives in the attic
without
flowers. She buries the messes.
My
hangover flares, like sciatica.
Tom
absorbs what he borrows —time, money
my old
flame, and every time I voyage
the grand
flight of stairs, past the cat
watching
over last night’s dessert
I expect
to see a notice on the kitchen door:
“Sign Up
Now for Talent Night.”
And one
night
I am the
town crier
with a
hunting horn
and dead
bell;
how long
have you been sleeping
with that
waitress in Phoenicia?
Hobnobbing
o yes o yes
my father
owned a fleet
of
champagne delivery trucks,
only to
have not forgotten
how he
smoked butts plucked
from the
street.
And one
night
I am the
lead in a French stage comedy,
breezy and
sweet-toothed
like a
coyote at a garden party.
As
Gretchen hitches up the new moon
I cut up
the old one into stars.
Going
to Maine
I remember
we were always going to Maine.
Up I-95 to
Ogunquit, past the Summer Stock
Playhouse,
then on to Kennebunkport, Portland —Exchange St
and the
little bar where the locals had their own mugs
hanging
from wooden hooks behind the cash register.
I remember
we were always going to Maine
and in his
plays Aristophanes
used the
names of people in the audience.
Going to
Maine was like that, especially the little bar
where the
locals had their own mugs
hanging
from wooden hooks behind the cash register.
It might
have been Gritty’s, or was it somewhere else?
You’d turn
to me and whisper —we’re becoming the instrument
of the
poem, and then Mike Powers, who had a stoneware stein
glazed
with castles and abbeys and horn players, said —in 427 BCE
The
Banqueters won
second prize at the annual City Dionysian
drama
competition
I
remember we were always going to Maine.
You talked
about your first love and said things
like la
douleur exquise, and the locals would say anything
south of
Augusta is really Massachusetts —maybe
going to
Maine we were searching for the fabled kingdom
of The
Birds, where everything is possible
and you
can sit and watch time pass, or talk to Angelica
or ask
Betty about the Airplane Poems, or play pinball
like Agnès
Varda and Jacques Demy at Cannes in ’62.
When
someone said get a room, we said
we’re
going to Maine because the rooms are better
than the
rooms in Springfield and Byfield
doesn’t
even have any rooms. It’s a simple thing
going to
Maine, like losing an earring in an enormous
blue lake.
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