HAREM

by Hugh Fox

Her ummmmmm, my third wife, sixty-four,
talking full time about "Everyone in my
family died in their sixties," although
(a face-lift 5 years ago) she looks fortyish,
e-mails every day from wife-possibles from
way back, sending me pictures of grandkids
("For me that's what counts, genetic continuation)
photos of themselves, poems, publishing questions,
when can I come out to Carpinteria to visit, five
months since Joey died (shark), "Let's meet in
Chicago," or this skin-cancer beauty in New
Hampshire, "The surgery went great, come for
a visit before the first snow...," my ex-student
in L.A., pals for 50 years, "This widow stuff is
crap...I need you...," a bunch of fucking saint-
whores, amazed at how the legs still hold up,
the surgically-chemically helped faces, and
always this sense of almost supernatural
get-together-foreverness, what I needed was
five lives and a theology that said "Who you
love you marry, forget numbers...."

AND THEN?

by Hugh Fox

Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki
and obliteration-bombing out the other
Japanese cities, thinking about nuked-out
Chicago, Oak Park, Highland Park, Boston,
Somerville, Cambridge, Harvard levelled,
never really stopping, Kansas City war
streets, 600 dead last year, moving toward
the possibility of wiping it ALL out, before
the sun wears out or the earth cracks into
pieces when all the oil-reserves inside it
that kept it round-together, are used up, as
if Much Ado About Nothing, M.J., Monet’s
meditations, Audrey Hepburn had never
been.

ANN FRANKING IT

by Hugh Fox

No Nazis so far this afternoon, but what about
all the break-ins in Everywherevilles, and the
Hand of Earthquake punching down on Haiti,
my sister-in-law’s pancreatic death-sentence,
in today’s obits no one over seventy-five and
I’m seventy-eight, Nazi cancering and suicide-
bombing, and even if everything was just sliding
down the perfect river in perfect sunlight, the
bowels start to go, the joints, tumors are born
smiling on the left side of the brain, the tongues
and clitori and toenails, hair and kneecaps,
baby-seeds and sperm all so perfectly planned
as we spin around sun-perfect seasons into
(where is He,
where are They?)
Culmination.

JACK

by Hugh Fox

Twenty years (at least) since he’d married Sarah (Thailand),
who was in med school with him at the University of Chicago,
and he’d gone back with her to Thailand, four orientalized Irisher
kids (three girls, one guy), and he’d gotten way inside the sa, wa,
yin, dee, sa wat language, although 90% of the time his fellow
M.D.’s made a point of speaking English with him, very happy
with the sea food and curry and Kaeng phet ped yang, duck and
red curry no less, her father and mother and brothers and.....then
one day, a letter from Chicago: “Kevin, they say I’ve got maybe,
at most, another 30 days to live, thinking about you full-time,
don’t know if you can...,” just dots, the handwriting
flimsily faltering, I DON’T KNOW IF YOU CAN, yeah,
man, I CAN-CAN-CAN.....horrible flight, Jack’s wife, Elsie,
picking him up at the airport, “Maybe we should
go out to the house first, you must be...,”“Nah, I slept
on the plane,let’s go see him...,” U. of Chicago hospital,
impressive place, into his (private) room, looked like
a corpse already, but “I know I’m only your a cousin,
and it’s been years, but...,” “I feel the same way about
you...and [looking loveingly at Elsie] Jill too...,” “All the
Christmases we had together, Easters, you know...,”
“The only brother I ever had was you...,” sitting down next
to the bed...,” jacking up their spirits, thinking “Jack in
the forever box...,” wiping that vigorously away and forcing
himself into the however-long-it-lasted, shared NOW.

3 poems by Hugh Fox

BRINGING

Bringing them all back, the right Andean
chemicals, prayers to the Underground
spirits, Great-Great-Great-Grandmother
Adeline Fox coming out of the Red Cedar
River, Great-Great-Great Grandfather
Sean walking over the mountains toward
our stone cabin with a pitchfork in his
hands praising Jesus, “Not long now and
He’ll be back,” The Inquisition hovering
around in the clouds as the Great-Great-
Great-Greaters make their way north into
Celticism, the latest womb-escaper, Beatrice,
coming into my workroom, “I want colored
paper, violet, I’m making violets,” as the
Weather Devil drolls on “Tomorrow, tomorrow,
tomorrow you’ll see, see, see.....,” feeling
existentially ONE as the rest of the antiquities
slither through the cracks in the windows and
drop down the chimney into the flames that
can’t/won’t touch them.



DIFFICULT

Difficult to imagine how, as art-lit-theater-film-
centric as I always was, with Hugh and Connie
in the same body, an only child unused to having
anyone around but Mom, Dad and ancient Prague
grandma, getting totally involved with doctorates
and jobs in Hollywood, Caracas, Florianópolis
Brazil, ever managed to get married three times
and father six children who produced six grandchildren
all ending up in the same town with my three wives
so that holidays/everydays become as holy as the Thou’s that
wave their wings around us in reproductive-speculative
joy as they see the universe , if only at times like these,
fulfill the expectations of creation.



IF

If you look at the rest of her it’s all
Spring legs, arms, belly-button, only
the face that’s late Fall, but Beethovening
into the Kreutzer Violin Sonata there’s
a certain agelessness that surfaces, like
all the students walking around campus
tonight, Bernadete lamenting “I wish I
could start all over again..the upswing
optimum instead of...,” two sisters dead
within the last six months.

LISTEN

by Hugh Fox

Listen to what the sub-, not terranean but
consciousness voices say, how to trill the
hands across the keyboard or slosh out into
the winter backforest, light the fire and
mind-draw the faces that will turn into
smoke-bones, Ellaraine now far away fifty
Pacific Palisades cliffs years old, and the
lipsticked lips still oatmeal and cranberry,
and bedtime it, if it’s to be as it’s never
been, BE it to the power of infinity,
the ancient Notre Dames and Nefertiti-
tunnel mummies, Machu-Tiawanaku
sacredness in the Name of The Now,
The Now and The Now.