Joseph Hutchison

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Poet: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison, Poet Laureate of Colorado (2014–2019), is the award-winning author of seventeen poetry collections, including The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; The Satire Lounge; Marked Men; Thread of the Real; and Bed of Coals. He has co-edited two poetry anthologies—the FutureCycle Press collection Malala: Poems for Malala Yousafzai (all profits to the Malala Foundation) with Andrea Watson and, with Gary Schroeder, A Song for Occupations: Poems about the American Way of Work. At the University of Denver’s University College, he directs two programs for working adults—Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture—with courses both online and on campus. Born and raised in Denver, Colorado, he now lives in the mountains southwest of the city with his wife, Iyengar yoga instructor Melody Madonna.

Poems

At Willamette National Cemetery

—For my father

The symmetry of this cemetery—
            even in death
                        the warriors

strictly formationed, at
            supine attention. Grey
                        granite plaques flat

in the drenched
            grass. At first I thought,
                        You deserve

something upright—something
            marble, the faint
                        rose of just-dawn

over the tarnished
            waves you sailed
                        in what others called

“The Good War.” You cared
            nothing for monuments, though;
                        never (as I

remember) used the word heroic
            for anything you or
                        anyone

did back then. It was just
            unjust necessity
                        that earned you this

plot, this plaque, this little flag stuck
            in the sod a few days
                        each year. Is that why

you chose this place? Preferring
            to have your name
                        carved on flat grey

stone, anchored in a slope of neatly
            mown grass—preferring
                        to any standing slab

the monumentally self-effacing
            drift of this
                        rainy late-May mist.

First published in Verse-Virtual and republished in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

Still’s Figure Speaks

—Clyfford Still’s PH-295 (1938)

I kept trying to plead with him.
No point. A spirit had his ear,
some wheedling Zeitgeist.
He couldn’t hear my shouts,
my cries, my howls of anguish.
I came across as a memory
of wind, I think, keening
out of the plains and gullies
of his childhood. “Behind
all my paintings stands
the Figure,” he once said.
Meaning me, swaddled
in blue flesh, which he then
ripped open to show the ribs,
unhinging my jaw with his
cold palette knife. Who
was I to him? What threat
did I pose that he felt driven
to drive me like a spike
through a hand, deep
into the Invisible? I think
he loved only essentials,
as Plato, my first lover,
loved Forms: chairness,
not the chair itself. Clyfford
wanted his convulsive shapes
and colors to contain me,
save me from touch (and so
himself). He couldn’t hear,
and now he’ll never. So why,
I wonder, do I keep hearing
my exiled voice call out:
“Miserere nobis, dear ghost,
damn you! Dona nobis pacem.”

First published in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

Ode to Something

Zero does not exist.

—Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

Why is there something
rather than nothing?
Because nothing
never was, was ever
just a trick of math
that turned
a placeholder
into lack,
into absence—
and zero
like a ball-peen
hailstone
struck
a crack across
the smooth windshield
of speeding
reason, making
the mind’s eye see
nothing
everywhere.

But nothing is nothing
like something,
something
with its amber
honeys, cabernets
and cheeses,
blood,
blindworms,
blossoms,
lips, hips, hands,
pain and rage,
heartbreak, night-sweats,
ten thousand joys
intense
and transient.
No wonder
so many dread
the sheer abundance
of something,
its “flow of
unforeseeable
novelty,” endless
irruption of
forms and essences.
How can reason hope
to hang its dream
of knowing all
on such a flood?
How feed
its fantasy of mapping
every last height,
every depth, making
both beginning and end
knuckle under
to understanding?
Therefore:
nothing. Nothing
that gives something
direction, an arc
of action,
a story,
a meaning,
the way deities
used to do.

Truth is, though, we
swim in mystery
reason can’t (can
never) plumb:
no beyond, only
being and somethingness:
our lives like sparks
in a vast
becoming,
bright flecks
of foam
on a breakneck river,
swirling in the world as is.

First published in The Lampeter Review and subsequently published in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

A Damped-Down Fire

[An excerpt from “A Marked Man”]

(April 21, 1865
Half Past 10:00 a.m.)

Boot-clatter out on the boardwalk’s
warped pine planks—boisterous
shouts and catcalls that wrench his gaze
from the brew gone flat as pond water
in its thick-sided mug. Soule turns,
squints: the saloon door stands
open onto Larimer street, its mud
a slops-and-horseshit pudding
runny with April thaw. He leans
toward it, on alert, but doesn’t rise,
merely gripping the glass mug-handle,
knuckles a sickly pinkish white.
Afraid? No man’s stuck that slur
on him, nor he on himself. Still,
when he touches the dim star
pinned to his duster’s black lapel,
its pointed reminder—Silas Soule,
Assistant Provost Marshal—his breath
stalls. Does he prod himself? Insist
that a brawl in the street’s his bailiwick,
his duty (whatever that might mean
in times like these)? In any case,
the chair holds him fast.

Boylan,
the barkeep, dragging his twisted leg
like a cottonwood branch, eases
to the flyblown window for a peek
under the gilt-lettered words Criterion
Saloon, then shrugs toward the marshal.
Soule resumes the study of his lager.
Boylan takes up the damp rag tied
to his apron string and begins to wipe
the nearest table.

Two months it’s been

since Soule testified—told the horrors
he’d seen at Sand Creek to the panel
convened by Colonel Moonlight.
A massacre, Soule called it, Chivington’s
rubbing out of Black Kettle’s village,
though some in Denver City said
we’re at war, which made it a battle,
and some called Soule a damn traitor
because he kept his men above the fray.
Boylan has seen with his own eyes
how death threats have turned up
under Soule’s plate while he stepped
out back for a piss. He eyes Soule now,
sidelong. Sure seems all the verve’s
been bled right out of him—a man
that used to laugh at his own sly jokes,
or wax philosophical over losing
at cards.
              “It all evens out in the end,”
he’d say, then wink: “Dust to dust,
no matter you’re planted with a jingle
in your pocket.”
                           Of course, marriage
sobered him up. The very prospect
made him jump at the Colonel’s offer
of a marshal’s star and steady pay.
Then came the inquest, and fresh
strikes by the Arapaho and Cheyenne
hot to avenge Chivington’s slaughter.
And Soule, for his testimony, called
by some an “Indian lover” like Tappan,
the man Moonlight picked to head
the investigation. Small wonder
some hate him, Boylan thinks. Still,
half the town feels damn appalled
by what was done, and looks on Soule
as a brave and honest man. Boylan
contemplates the marshal’s contemplation.
Why don’t he just go on? When Soule
sits down for a meal, the place
soon empties out—for who’d care
to risk their health by sitting near
so marked a man? Look at him. What
could he be reading in that spindly foam
scrawled across the pale gold surface
of his beer?
                    Now a stamping of boots
brings some stranger in: battered valise
and derby, green paisley vest. Soule
doesn’t stir as the man picks out a table
by the shrouded piano, swatting dust
from his trousers before taking a chair.
This one’s either unafraid, thinks Boylan,
or ignorant. Or both. The new arrival
spots him and barks, “A Mule Skinner,
my good man.”
                          Boylan runs a thumbnail
across his whiskery chin, then drags
himself over to his customer. “Friend,
there’s tequila in back, but I’m fresh out
of blackberry liquor.”
                                    The stranger’s
brow wrinkles and he juts his jaw.
“What’s he drinking?”
                                     Boylan
can almost feel the marshal stiffen.
“Solomon Tascher,” he says.
                                               “Beer?”
the gent wonders.
                             “So-called,”
says Boylan.
                      The stranger shrugs.
“Beans and bacon too, if you got it—
and the bacon ain’t rancid.”
                                              Boylan
grits his teeth. “That’ll be three dollars,
friend. Gold only. Coin, or nuggets or dust
weighed at the bar.”
                                 The man frowns,
reaches inside his vest—and Boylan
blanches. But the fellow merely
brings forth a crooked black cheroot.
He holds it up with a kind of reverence,
like a golden nugget. “And a lucifer,
my man, if you got one.”
                                         “Sure thing,”
Boylan says, thinking, And I ain’t
your man. He turns then to find
the marshal’s up at last and headed
for the door.
                    “Take care now, Silas,”
he calls.
              Without looking back,
Soule calls, “G’day, John,” and steps
out into the mild April sun.
                                            “Here now,”
the gent says, a keenness in his voice.
“Would he be Captain Silas Soule?
Of Sand Creek?”
                            Boylan’s eyes narrow.
“That’s Silas Soule of Denver City,
Assistant Provost Marshal here.
Who wants to know?”
                                     “Damn me,”
the man says. “He’s what brought me
here from Boston.”
                                Boylan hides a grin.
Had Soule heard that he’d crack, Strange!
I’d have thought you’d traveled here
by stagecoach.
                        “Boston,” Boylan says.
His own home town.
                                   “Boston, yes.
I write for The Boston Journal.”

                                                    “Do you, now?
You must know Perley, then. I used to read
his Washington letters over breakfast, before
I lit out for the West.”
                                    “Perley,” the man
drawls. “Sure. Hell of a pen.”
                                                Boylan
shrugs. “A good Whig,” he said, “then
a good Republican. Like yourself,
I guess.”
               The man flashes a white smile.
“Sure,” he says. “Of course.”
                                                “You’re a bit
far from the Back Bay,” Boylan says.
“Have you caught gold fever?”
                                                  “Not at all,”
the man laughs, then lowers his voice. “Y’see,
I’m here to follow the Sand Creek inquiry,
and interview the principals if I can.”
He glances toward the window. Soule
stands outside with his back to the glass
like a man listening to distant thunder.
“Think he’d talk to me?”
                                         This question
gives Boylan pause. Before Sand Creek,
before the inquest, Soule was the kind
you couldn’t shut up. Now he smolders
like a damped-down fire. “Can’t say,”
Boylan answers at last. “He’s bound
for his office down the street, I believe.
I can’t swear he’ll be open to talk.
Could be he’s talked enough.”

First published in Marked Men (Turning Point Books, 2013).

Tests of Faith

(four voices)

I slaughtered my first infidel,
but only after showing him
what mercy the Lord demands.
Go on, I whispered. Say goodbye
to that wife of yours. The man

sobbed into the hooded eye
of the camera, stammering love.
Later: two hours of fervent prayer,
five of celebration. My brothers’
cheers broke like spring rain

over my buzzing head, bathed
my fevered face. I’d begged
to be given a vision of heaven,
and had my answer: the gash
parting thick lips beneath

the gliding blade, the shudder,
the seizure of breathlessness,
the sanctified release. My hand
made rock by the strength of God.
This righteous hand!

I strapped my first jihadi down,
strapped down jaw and brow
to make him gape, gagged him—
then let the cold water pour. Go on!
I roared. Tell us again how great

Allah is! Hanson circled, aimed
the Handycam; the hajji thrashed,
gasped, retched—how many times?
I lost count. But, at last, he lapsed
against the board, mother-naked,

a void. Fuck, I said. But Hanson
had a plan. We laid the guy on ice
in a ration crate, pending the next
trash run. Later: two hours toasting
American ingenuity at the Baghdad

Country Club, ’til Hanson’s head
lolled to the table. I drank on,
thanking Christ the Army drummed
every weakness out of my heart.
This well-trained heart!

I strangled my first poet
in the mirror. The nightmare's
pulsing alarm conjured up
a thudding ’copter, the broad
blade of its searchlight cleaving

my tongue's hoof. The most
horrible things, says Linh Dinh,
become mere spectacles to the true
outsider. Which side of my skin
is best to write on? Will I turn

into a tattoo addict, or a habitué
of opium dens? Read an American
account of the war, and you see
how excited the writer is. He is
almost gleeful. Linh, don't tell me

brutality’s the lingua franca now!
I feel sick gutting a fish. Caught
in the gunship’s shadow, I grieve
hearing news about the divorce
of Signifier and Signified.

I signed the executive order,
and the mosque was crushed.
I (another I) whispered a code,
and weeks later yet another I
climbed a shattered ladder

made of bomb-vest fragments
toward a hive full of virgins.
I voted billions for the Pentagon
in exchange for certain photos.
In lieu of the news, I recited

a teleprompter’s lies. I marched
for peace, but no one could read
my sign’s scribbled Aramaic.
My brothers and I surrounded
our whorish sister and broke her

with stones. My taxes rained
down like fire on the orphans.
Sometimes I wake in the night
and think, The war is over.
But another I remembers.

First published in Thread of the Real (2012) and republished in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

The Blue

In memory of Michael Nigg,
April 28, 1969 – September 8, 1995

The dream refused me his face.
There was only Mike, turned away;
damp tendrils of hair curled out
from under the ribbed, rolled
brim of a knit ski cap. He’s hiding

the wound, I thought, and my heart
shrank. Then Mike began to talk—
to me, it seemed, though gazing off
at a distant, sunstruck stand of aspen
that blazed against a ragged wall

of pines. His voice flowed like sweet
smoke, or amber Irish whiskey;
or better: a brook littered with colors
torn out of autumn. The syllables
swept by on the surface of his voice—

so many, so swift, I couldn’t catch
their meanings … yet struggled not
to interrupt, not to ask or plead—
as though distress would be exactly
the wrong emotion. Then a wind

gusted into the aspen grove, turned
its yellows to a blizzard of sparks.
When the first breath of it touched us,
Mike fell silent. Then he stood. I felt
the dream letting go, and called,

“Don’t!” Mike flung out his arms,
shouted an answer … and each word
shimmered like a hammered bell.
(Too soon the dream would take back
all but their resonance.) The wind

surged. Then Mike leaned into it,
slipped away like a wavering flame.
And all at once I noticed the sky:
its sheer, light-scoured immensity;
the lavish tenderness of its blue.

First published in The Rain at Midnight (2000) and republished in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

City Limits

For Melody

You’re like wildwood at the edge of a city.
And I’m the city: steam, sirens, a jumble
of lit and unlit windows in the night.

You’re the land as it must have been
and will be—before me, after me.
It’s your natural openness
I want to enfold me. But then
you’d become city; or you’d hide
away your wildness to save it.

So I stay within limits—city limits,
heart limits. Although, under everything,
I have felt unlimited Earth. Unlimited you.

First published in House of Mirrors (1992) and republished in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

Comfort Food

Long Distance

His mother knows
who but not where
he is. She warns
into the phone, “Don’t
rake leaves too long,
you’ll hurt your back.”
Out his window,
leafless piney ridges,
the farther ranges
snowbound. “Don’t
worry now,” he says.
“I’ll be careful.”

Next time she knows
where but not who.
“You never listened,”
in a child’s voice.
“It’s me,” he begins.
She snaps: “You think
I don’t know that?”
And suddenly she’s
chatting about the rain
and fog out her window,
there at the far other
end of the line.

Breath

The world enters
us as breath. We

return it to itself
as breath. When

we’re done with
the world, where

(he wonders) does
all that breath go?

A Travelin’ Woman

The last words his mother said to him
were (as usual) long distance. Freed
at last from the doctors’ clutches,

delivered by wheelchair into the human
tenderness of hospice, she exulted
into the phone: “I’m a travelin’ woman!”

“Where you headed?” he said, buoyed
by her joy. “Where?” she laughed.
“I don’t know. Timbuktu!”

Dream Image After
the First Good Cry

westwarding river—
red-gold shreds of Sun scattered
on it and in it

Open Casket

She’s a stranger, though he has to agree

they’ve done a beautiful job with her hair,
and yes she looks peaceful, out of pain,

and the silk blouse under the black sweater
shines like the petals of a sun-struck lily,
and the hands, one atop the other, look

as if he’d held them. Knowing he doesn’t
know this stranger, though, he turns away,

eyes shut tight to remember his mother.

Going On

They knew her breath would stop,
as her husband’s breath had stopped.
As people by the thousands every day
stop, breathing the world back one

last time into itself. Like all mourners,
they felt the world itself should stop.
But no. The world simply took her
last breath back—then began to share

it among them in the form of weeping.
Like a sacred bread. This sorrow bread.
Can this be the secret, then? The breath
they all had shared with her so long

still here, in the world—the world’s
going-on keeping it in circulation?
Small wonder they savor the ache of it:
the unstopped breath of a mother’s love.

*
Rereading “Hear”

—after Lorine Niedecker

Twenty-some years
back he sounded out
her transcription of
mourning doves
                              You
ah you
               her mother
gone gravely still

Only now has he
come to hear those
doves her way:
                         True
too true
               he longs
to say—

To whom?

Comfort Food

A fifty-something crying in the dairy aisle,
lost in a dream of his dead mother. Grief
welled up in him, “out of nowhere”
(as they say), and now he’s a spectacle.

At least his display turns out to be brief.

He smiles abjectly a moment, “gathers
his wits,” lets loose a broken sigh—
then picks out the goods he came to buy.
Butter. Cheese. The whole milk of childhood.

First published in Thread of the Real (2012) and republished in The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016).

Guanábana

Spanish translation by Patricia Herminia

After hurricane Gilbert, this place
was only shredded jungle. Now
it's Jesús and Lídia's casa,

built by him, by hand, weekends
and vacations, the way my father
built our first house. Years

we've watched the house expand,
two rooms to three, to four, to five.
The yard, just a patch of gouged

sand and shattered palmettos once,
is covered now in trimmed grass,
bordered by blushing frangipani

and pepper plants—jalapeños,
habaneros—and this slender tree
Jesús planted three years back,

a stick with tentative leaves then
out of a Yuban coffee can, but now
thirty feet high, its branches laden

with guanábana—dark green
pear-shaped fruit with spiky skin
and snowy flesh, with seeds

like obsidian tears. Jesús
carves out a bite and offers it
on the flat of his big knife's blade:

the texture's melonish, the taste
wild and sweet—like the lives
we build after hurricanes.

Guanábana

Spanish translation by Patricia Herminia

Después del hurabán Gilbert, este lugar
era nada más que una selva hecho trizas. Ahora
es la casa de Jesús y Lídia,

construído por él, a mano, fines de semana
y vacaciones, como hizo mi padre cuando
construyó nuestra primera casa. Hace años

hemos mirado la casa ampliar,
dos cuartos a tres, a cuatro, a cinco.
El patio, antes nada más que un trozo

de arena excavada y palmitos destrozados,
ahora está cubierto de hierba recortada,
bordeada por franchipanieros ruborizantes

y plantas de pimienta—jalapeños,
habaneros—y un tal árbol delgado
que Jesús plantó hace tres años atrás,

por aquel entonces un palo con hojas titubiantes
sacado de una lata de café Yuban, pero ahora
treinta metros de altura, sus ramas repletas

de guanábana—una fruta verde oscuro
con forma de pera, piel de espinas
y carne nevosa, con semillas

como lágrimas obsidianas. Jesús
corta un bocado y lo ofrece
en la hoja de su cuchillo grande:

la textura es de melón, el sabor
silvestre y dulce—como las vidas
que construímos después de los huracanes.

English original first published in The Earth-Boat (2012), reprinted in World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015 (New York Quarterly Books, 2016), and republished with Patricia Herminia’s Spanish translation in Eyes of the Cuervo / Ojos del Crow (Harmony Hill Books, 2018).

Chopped Earth Under Curdled Clouds

(A landscape picture)

As El Greco might have done it,
although that crevice of dry creek’s
no Tagus River, the slouching wreck
of abandoned farmhouse no Toledo.
Still, as this flood of fraught light
draws me to a stop just off the road
to grab notebook and pen, so it might

have made the artist seize his brush,
reflect, transform, imbue, express—
before the scene’s charged figurations
crumbled into opaque particulars.
Sure enough, by the time I look up
from the page, the crumbling’s begun.
The depth of field’s shallowed, and now

each high-embossed clod and furrow
flattens, and the clouds seem to sink,
dissolving into this slow flow of mist.
Soon the sun’s a faint-hearted blur,
the house ghosted, the creek erased.
No castle walls here, no cathedral spire,
to hold the heavens and Earth in place.