POETRY
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by
Hugh Fox
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The Montréal Review, February 2011
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VERSUS
Blunt stone casements and Hi-Def days
that just as well could have been turned
off, year-long Wednesdays and beer-out,
slug-out Saturdays sliding into jingle
dreamlands that never come....
Versus
Allegro
wallless denominationless ecstatically-plussed
Now-Days
just like back in Berkeley in 1958.
***
GETTING INSIDE
Getting inside the jocularing flute slides
and sun-through-the-leaves viola skittering
and cello-violin conversations ("Leave the
way I am, he's the echo, not me!") of Mozart's
Flute Quartet #1, state of the unioning, brain
shattering, digging out (or death-down) gone
until the Rondeau takes its last breath.
***
TURNING
(Mozart's Flute Quartet #1)
Turning sound into just the
right sack-flow silk skirts and
legs, the right sherry, sun on the
invasion hills
pacified
for a
thousand years now
wheat
thistles
God
grasses
maple sugarings
***
EVERY
Every water-sip, chocolate-coated raisin
Xanax,
entrance into shoes and suspenders
pillow toss-around,
chemotherapeutic pill,
pulling on of sox,
getting that first crap out
in the morning,
twenty good-night kisses before
sleep-try time,
last words on the last night,
drifting into nowhere
as much ritual as the blessing of
wines,
vines,
god-births.
***
Hugh Fox was born in Chicago in 1932. He spent his childhood studying violin, piano, composition and opera. He received a M.A. degree in English from Loyola University in Chicago and his Ph.D. in American Literature from the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). He was a professor at Michigan State University in the Department of American Thought and Language from 1968 until his retirement in 1999. Fox is the author of the first critical study of Charles Bukowski and one of the founders of the Pushcart Prize.
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