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 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.

Another 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

http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson 

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 eomewhere 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
http://www.pahutchinson.com
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson

Universal

I have been with my eldest child
Where she lay small and in pain.
I was bouncing her bed to sleep
To sleep to the song of the oldest prayer,
To one of the oldest songs of love,
Known to Priam and Hector at Troy
Known to Lear, Known to Kent,
Known to the heart that pumps in a jar,
Known to the crowd at the accident.
I want to die before you die
I want to die before you die.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
This poem was published in Canadian Poetry
Thirty five years ago

Adventures in charity:
You knew they would be dangerous.

Compassion as the last pity goes.
You used to win people. Now
Like a missionary you live among those
You did not attract, or choose,
Or win, witness for a sweet god only as strong as alms.
Since you were 16 you knew
You would stop making your life shine.
You are working on the invisible cathedral.
Now you know what gargoyles really are.

Here is what mother Theresa learned:
Only alms are stronger than doubt.

You are a pilgrim now, the word worn out,
The pilgrim washed and scrubbed and fresh.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
pahutchinson@icloud.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

True But Not Real

Much that I love is true but not real.
Your love is the prayer not limited to believers.
Your love links me to so much,
So much that I love that is true but not real.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

These Are Your Courage Lessons

These are your courage lessons:

You are one of the outsmarted,

With the outsmarted women and children.

The devils laughed at your sex.

They were the local devils.

They laughed at your sex.

They laugh at a child’s courage.

If you have grace

You might get alms

As good as love,

The same as love.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson

Copyright Paul Anthony Hutchinson
http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

One Lay Down

.
I pretended to be one for whom
The food and bed were blessed
Until they were.

Say only the grace you can pray for and get:

Ask for courage and character.
Ask for a sign:

I saw the short nightgown, green as a mallard’s head.
I saw the Sign of the Shining Bed.

I had the little autism
Until one lay down.

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com

A Spring Evening in Paris

Anthony found Ellen in the good samaritan way you would try.
If you are not alluring there are other ways.
Ellen, drunk, was left alone near St. Severin off the Rue de la Harpe
Where you smell butter and garlic and mussels and iodine
From bistros open to the street. Anthony loved that you could see
Some lovers eating and drinking in those bistros, happy and good.
He wanted to be in one with a girl.

Ellen, mottled in mottled lamplight on the churchyard cobbles:
Freckled, brown eyed, strong in clean denim overalls and white T-shirt. Barnyard coloured cowlick. She knelt there being sick and knelt inside Anthony,
In a lyric opportunity.
Not many chances like this in life. He nursed and guarded 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 represents 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 can represent everything.

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 shiny good love made both of stealth and of cunning…

Paul Anthony Hutchinson
http://www.paulanthonyhutchinson.com
pahutchinson@icloud.com

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