fall and its lashing colors
by Damon Hubbs
“And it’s a story that’s been going on
for ages,” you said.
That’s okay because I’ve been doing impressions
of myself for just as long.
Amy’s party. But all the girls named Bunny hog the house.
The question of wolves doesn’t bother them.
You said your relative, Mary
was the first woman off the Mayflower.
New England’s monotonous sublime, in fall
on campus —your eyes the agonized blue
(who said that?) of industrialists,
federal judges, the sea captains of Brunswick
who built the finest houses on Lincoln St.
with Portland dry pressed brick.
The theme is witches,
Levana and Our Ladies of Sorrows.
Keg in the corner.
Liquor on the counter.
Suzy arriving
Pat fleeing (again, for cigarettes at Cumby’s).
Elizabeth, and her cousin the Swiss chemist,
audacious makers of birdies and pars;
the NECCO girls, the Bradstreet Five,
Billy’s family with an open tab at the Chit Chat Lounge
since 1640 (again, for cigarettes at Cumby’s).
Poor Jean. They call her pussy the Masshole.
Adam’s shrill, high-paced fretting
market plumbing, cocaine cut with Haverhill gasoline;
doors, locks, windows, all haunted,
eyes like ice blocks floating down the Merrimack.
Ester’s mother kept her husband in a jar.
Clara returned from a summer overseas
wearing a broken hymen
like the most glorious accessory,
Tiffany,
Elsa Peretti, split ring in gold.
I’m not allowed beyond the Alps
antiquing on Saturdays, with you, and your mother.
Her picture of the Arbella (1630) sold for what?
Fall and its lashing colors. She stood out stark
and her spiraled apple galette
was the toast of every Wet Paint auction.
She took three lovers at the Todd Farm Flea Market
among furniture with ripped backsides,
scraps of sawn-off guns, two cannons,
a Whydah bell, and a silver plaque
believed to be engraved by Paul Revere (no, never proven…)
Right top bananas, these town histories,
and she, baron bold, never tight-assed
like the first misshapen snow that whitens Boston Common.
If she’d had a boy,
she would have named him Mansard.
Now I strain against my clothes
when her perfume ties me up
in a perfect little bow.
I listen to the
Chorus
cod, bean
Lowells, Cabots.
Lust, learning, my soul settled by outcasts
what did you expect
I have the taste in my head.
All of it, and the price of salt
up my nose
like the 23 escalators at Barneys.
“Welcome Back Ray.”
Four-hundred-and-fifteen acres, the Gothic chapel,
clouds like pencil shavings, your Deerfield dad, a dapper Roland,
a forlorn knight without a horn. Thrice cuckolded.
That year you did a radio play of Marat/Sade
wrote poems about the senses
making sense when disarrayed;
I grew my hair long
and leaned sleeveless out the window, shouting
“Habemus papam!”
Youth didn’t seem to give a damn,
was of its period, a sage-on-stage.
We called the quad the Ladies Mile.
As for me and my house, hysteria seized us—
stoned our hearts. We screamed, writhed, barked (I, Tituba!)
We ate blueberry muffins at Jordan Marsh,
Downtown Crossing during the holiday rush;
saw your sister’s picture on the spinning cubes
in the Junior Department, in the brightness of her promise;
she’ll be the self-appointed queen
of Hampton Beach one day —dead at thirty
in Old Wick, Wickford, or was it Warwick?
Fall is dilating, more profane than sacred
but like the graces all the same.
A window-dresser without a hat department,
the plum light, another year closer to Auden.
I’ve stopped kissing the brats goodnight.
Now I’m graceless.
I’ve stopped kissing my wife.
Grown more brutish. My semen cold
and lashing.
Nobody leaves on the light.
The weather-cock points south,
cinches hold. I can’t remember the
Chorus
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