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Andrew Hudgins

When we first heard from blocks away
the fog truck's blustery roar,
we dropped our toys, leapt from our meals,
and scrambled out the door

into an evening briefly fuzzy.
We yearned to be transformed—
translated past confining flesh
to disembodied spirit.  We swarmed

in thick smoke, taking human form
before we blurred again,
turned vague and then invisible,
in temporary heaven.

Freed of bodies by the fog,
we laughed, we sang, we shouted.
We were our voices, nothing else.
Voice was all we wanted.

The white clouds tumbled down our streets
pursued by spellbound children
who chased the most distorting clouds,
ecstatic in the poison.

Home (from Court Square Fountain— where affluent ghosts still importune a taciturn slave to entertain them with a slow barbarous tune in his auctioned baritone— to Hank Williams' headstone atop a skeleton loose in a pristine white suit and bearing a pristine white bible, to the black bloodstain on Martin King's torn white shirt and Jim Clark's baton, which smashed black skulls to gelatin) was home, at fifteen: brimstone on Sunday morning, badminton hot afternoons, and brimstone again that night.

Storms of perfume lift from honeysuckle, lilac, clover—and drift across the threshold, outside reclaiming inside as its home. Warm days whirl in a bright unnumberable blur, a cup—a grail brimmed with delirium and humbling boredom both. I was a boy, I thought I'd always be a boy, pell—mell, mean, and gaily murderous one moment as I decapitated daises with a stick, then overcome with summer's opium, numb—slumberous.

After my night job, I sat in class and ate, every thirteen minutes, an orange peanut—butter cracker. Bright grease adorned my notes. At noon I rushed to my day job and pushed a broom enough to keep the boss calm if not happy. In a hiding place, walled off by bolts of calico and serge, I read my masters and copied Donne, Marlowe, Dickinson, and Frost, scrawling the words I envied, so my hand could move as theirs had moved and learn outside of logic how the masters wrote. But why?

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