Marilyn Higginson, Amphora #5, Raku, 12h x 5.5w x 3″ mouth diameter
Ulysses and an Aroostook County Girls’ High School
Basketball Team in a 1923 Yearbook Photo
Maybe they’d be flattered by a visit, this spooky
exsanguinated squad of ex-nubiles
in baggy sailor-suit jumpers, marcelled and spit-
curled for the photographer, a boozy old pervert
from Bangor empurpled by his stiff
collar. C’mon, sweetie! Smile. Say cheese…
I’d slit my wrists for the one far left, front row,
the brunette with the eyebrows
and knobby knees. Like Ulysses I’d slop blood
into one of Heaven’s potholes
so I could bring her back to life and dazzle her
with the hottest news from the dazzling
future. Smart phones. Clones. Drones. Oodles
of virtual money. Drink up! I’d urge whenever
conversation lags, bleeding out as much
as I dare. Let’s hold hands! I’d beg. Canoodle
with a ukulele in a canoe! Rattle off to the ocean
in a rumble seat! But she’d want only
to talk about great-grandkids and winters shared
with that jug-eared Canadian moustache
she married, the guy who clodhoppered potatoes
and tramped the woods shooting porcupines and
skinning bobcats for seventy-two years
before dying on the stoop, a briarwood clenched
in his toothless jaw. He’d be flickering
in the background with the other ghosts, bloodless
and mute, suffused with the maddening inscrutable
gravity of the dead. He always liked how I cooked
salmon, she’d recall, fading on me
but remembering to thank me for the drink…
___________________________
Michael Derrick Hudson
Review by Jared Pearce
We tend to romanticize the past, and this poem really works to romanticize it—showing that by doing so we really only discover that the past wants to stay the past and not get tangled up in our time and concerns. The dramatization of the situation is delightful, feels very Corso-ean to me. My only real concern is what Penelope would think? Then again, perhaps the eyebrowed girl is Penelope? I wouldn’t put it past Hudson to forge that link.