Richard Hugo Is A Better Poet Than You
Graves - by Richard Hugo
The flat year, when summer never arrived
grass lived green to August and we buried love
under the grass and marked the grave with a stick.
Wherever we went that fall, Mexico City,
Istanbul, we vowed to go back next year
and dig love up, resurrect love, make love
something for the ages. We planned disciples
and a book big as the bible. It was all set,
even the witnesses historians believe.
Years later, we found the stick knocked down
by rain, but the spot was certain, there
twelve paces from the apple tree, on a line
with the bay and the anchored freighter
we knew would never move. We dug
and dug. Two moons went by. No love.
We rechecked memory and map and still
only brown dirt and the earthworms twisting away.
We should never have named what we buried.
We know now it wasn't love. Nor a tin can
packed with diamonds. Whatever it was,
dead cat, dead salmon, it flourished
only when skies are odd, when the summer
we expect fails and those abnormal rains
keep the world green longer than the eye takes
to imagine "nothing certain" instead of "love"
on the headstone, rivers fat and trout spawning
year round as if September will not end.
Druid Stones at Kensaleyre - by Richard Hugo
I imagine Druids timeless, so lacking
a sense of time that, like animals, they found
every moment loaded with now, and no future,
no, or too much, awareness of death. These two stones,
woman and man I'd guess, will age no faster
than the bay they overlook. Like all stone
they will stay young and know nothing.
Driving north from Portree, from a certain point
on the road the church at Kensaleyre
looks higher than the stones I say
are woman and man, and that seems wrong.
Sundays, a cleric lays on stone ears
modern concepts of sin. Stone throats don't tighten.
The sea doesn't listen. I, who don't go to church,
live alone with what I've done.
Some day I'll bypass the church and keep going
across the brief moor to where they stand,
that young couple, beautiful, poised.
I'll put out my hand and say my name.
They'll say "Welcome" in stone. If you pass
in your car and see three of us solid
forever above and one with the sea, despite the wear
of weather and the way indifferent traffic
hurts even the stoniest heart, know one
came late, is happy and won't be back.