Poetry: Hugh Fox

The Eternal

The eternal (deer,turkeys, cranes as we slide by
wilderness and empty corn and soy fields during
our daily immersion-in-reality drives, phoning
Alexander in Cambridge, tenth grandson birthday,
“Thanks for the check, and I want to come to
visit over the Christmas-holidays,” my getting
the tapioca and papaya ready, engulfed in a few
tablespoons of unpourable titillating Bavarian
honey, the right temperature, bed, bedclothes
and dreaming I’m on stage again (age ten) at the
Opera House in Chicago in the children’s chorus
in Carmen, the visiting-travelling Met, Gladys
Swarthout as Carmen,the first snows, the first
spring rains, something mysteriously huge on
the late-Fall roof last night, that vanished when
I went outside and started growling at two
AM, getting totally involved with THE COLOR
PURPLE and the new Shubertian-Debussyian
work by the undergrad students in the Michigan
State University music college, going down to
the beach from my wife’s sister’s house in
Florianopolis, Brazil, walking out into the ocean
up to my neck, the water about two degrees
colder than my body temperature, just Goodnights
and Good Mornings, my thirty year old son
living downstairs saying Goodnight every
night, “I love you, ” “Me too…,” going to
marry a Thailandese lawyer beauty, my own
surgeries successful…for the time being…,
the pre-Columbian, Peruvian, Chilean,
Bolivian, South Dakota relic-covered walls
of my life…) versus….
at 87 every time we pass a cemetery, reading
as many names as I can,
feeling….