Hudgins - American rendering: new and selected poems

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN HARCOURT
BOSTON NEW YORK
2010

Copyright 2010 by Andrew Hudgins

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hudgins, Andrew.
American rendering : new and selected poems / Andrew Hudgins.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-0-547-24962-9
I. Title.
PS 3558. U 288 A 83 2010
811'54dc22 2009029079

Book design by Brian Moore

Printed in the United States of America

DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Poems from the following books are reprinted by permission of Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Saints and Strangers,
copyright 1985 by Andrew Hudgins. After the Lost War, copyright 1988 by
Andrew Hudgins. The Never-Ending, copyright 1991 by Andrew Hudgins. The
Glass Hammer, copyright 1994 by Andrew Hudgins. Babylon in a Jar, copyright
1998 by Andrew Hudgins.

Poems from Ecstatic in the Poison are reprinted by permission of Overlook
Press, copyright 2003 by Andrew Hudgins.

FOR ERIN

Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together
almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involv'd and
interwoven with the knowledge of evill, and in so many cunning
resemblances hardly to be discern'd, that those confused seeds
which were impos'd on Psyche as an incessant labour to cull out,
and sort asunder, were not more intermixt. It was from out the
rinde of one apple tasted, that the knowledge of good and evill
as two twins cleaving together leapt forth into the World. And
perhaps this is that doom which Adam fell into of knowing good
and evill, that is to say of knowing good by evill. As therefore the
state of man now is; what wisdome can there be to choose, what
continence to forbeare without the knowledge of evill?

JOHN MILTON, "AREOPAGITICA "

NEW POEMS

My Daughter 3

Mother 4

Accelerator 5

Lorraine's Song 6

Walking a True Line 7

Everything Before "Happy" Is True 8

After Teaching 9

Under the Horse 10

The Blind Woman's Orchid 11

Abandoning the Play 12

A Handful of Keys 14

Blowfly 15

Outside the Inn 16

Among Verbena 17

Came Back 18

The Circus 19

Cicada 20

The Names of the Lost 21

Courtesy 22

The Afterimage of a Ghost 25

The Bluebird, Singing, Leaps into the Sky 27

Epithalamium 29

American Rendering 30

Lightning Strike in Paradise 32

FROM SAINTS AND STRANGERS (1985)

The Persistence of Nature in Our Lives 35

The Choice the Driver Makes 37

Something Wakes Me Up 38

My Father's House 39

Late Spring in the Nuclear Age 40

Magnolias 41

Awaiting Winter Visitors: Jonathan Edwards, 1749 42

Madonna of the Pomegranate 44

Returning Home to Babylon 45

Saints and Strangers 48

1. At the Piano 48

2. Eve's Sin 50

3. Where the River Jordan Ends 51

4. Loose Change 53

5. The Southern Crescent Was on Time 54

6. A Kiss in Church 57

7. Glossolalia 58

8. Saints and Strangers 60

FROM AFTER THE LOST WAR (1988)

Child on the Marsh 65

At Chancellorsville: The Battle of the Wilderness 68

On the Killing Floor 69

Burial Detail 71

After the Lost War: In MontgomeryAugust 1866 74

Raven Days 78

Reflections on Cold Harbor 79

Fishkill on the Chattahoochee 81

The Summer of the Drought 82

Listen! The Flies 83

His Wife 85

A Husband on the Marsh 86

He Imagines His Wife Dead 90

Dying 91

The Hereafter 95

FROM THE NEVER-ENDING (1991)

How Shall We Sing the Lord's Song in a Strange Land? 99

The Cestello Annunciation 102

The Ugly Flowers 103

Praying Drunk 105

Bewilderments of the Eye 108

Two Ember Days in Alabama 110

Heat Lightning in a Time of Drought 112

The Yellow Harvest 115

In the Game 116

Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead 118

Compost: An Ode 119

The Unpromised Land 121

New Headstones at the Shelby Springs Confederate Cemetery 124

Christ as a Gardener 126

Communion in the Asylum 127

Psalm Against Psalms 128

FROM THE GLASS HAMMER (1994)

The Glass Hammer 133

My Father's Corpse 134

Grandmother's Spit 135

Dog Pile 136

Haircut 137

Transistor Radio 138

Fireflies After Twilight 139

Begotten 140

Blue Danube 141

Magic Button 142

Thus 143

Jack 144

Colonel 146

At Work 147

Hunting with My Brother 148

FROM BABYLON IN A JAR (1998)

The Chinaberry 151

Ashes 153

One Threw a Dirt Clod and It Ran 156

Wind 157

The Daffodils Erupt in Clumps 159

Elegy for the Bees 161

Bodies of Water 162

Babylon in a Jar 165

How to Stop 168

In Alesia 171

Rain 173

Ball 175

Keys 177

When the Weak Lamb Dies 179

Tools: An Ode 181

The Hanging Gardens 182

FROM ECSTATIC IN THE POISON (2003)

In 189

Beneath the Apple 190

The Ship Made for Burning 192

The Cadillac in the Attic 194

Southern Literature 195

The Chinaberry Trees 197

The White Horse 200

Come to Harm 202

The God of Frenzies 204

Behemoth and Leviathan 206

Beatitudes 208

In the Cool of the Evening 209

The Fourth Year of an Eight-Year Drought 211

Land of the White Crows 213

Wasps in August 214

A Joke Walks into a Bar 215

The Long Ship 217

Piss Christ 218

Blur 219

Out 221

Acknowledgments 223

After midnight, I dragged carpet padding
from a trash bin and spread it on the asphalt
between the wall and dumpster. Screened from sleet,
I pulled carpet remnants over me, and that night
I married, raised a family, and outlived everyone
except a daughtera teacherand her two children,
one damaged. I woke when a bread truck scraped the bin.
From under damp carpet, I watched punctilious men
sign invoices, sweep, hose down the docks. A boy
in a bloody butcher's smock leaned against the wall
and smoked through bloody fingers.
At night, I search
and sometimes find my daughter. "I make good money now,"
I tell her. "Let me take Teresa home with me.
I can buy the help she needs." My daughter smiles,
asks how I'm doing, and I lose the moment
to my wife, my job, my actual
family, as the thick-faced infant bucks in her arms
or beats her forehead hard and almost musically
against the table. When I clench her to my belly,
she screams, red-faced and rigid. "Hush, hush, hush,"
I serenade her. "O unhushable baby, hush."

Down the long, wide, and closely trimmed acres of Mammon,
plate toppling with saffron potato salad, I followed my shadow
to an appealingly dilapidated pond. Ghostly koi coasted under ripples
undulating to the tempo of hidden pumps. Fish mouths
mouthed my shadow, and among them moved a golden
adumbration. Voluptuous fins feathered the water, blossoming
like massive chrysanthemums that opened and opened
bud to blowsy, blowsy to blownand gently closed.
Gold propelled itself on delicate explosions, dissolving
and resolving in aureate metamorphoses, golden fish to golden flower,
flower to fish. But fins I thought petals were actually,
I could not believe this, wings. It was a trained bird, a pullet,