HENRY HUGHES's poems have appeared in Antioch Review, Carolina Quarterly, Sewanee Review, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Seattle Review and Poetry Northwest. He is the author of four poetry collections, including Men Holding Eggs, which received the 2004 Oregon Book Award, and the memoir, Back Seat with Fish: Adventures in Angling and Romance. Hughes edited the Everyman’s anthologies, The Art of Angling: Poems about Fishing and Fishing Stories. His commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review.
Mink Fur
Alarm-wired gates, double doors,
glandy stink and sleek brown peeks
from small rattling cages. Their long glossy twisting
gloved screeching into the gasser. Painless, the rancher says.
Then out to the pelting shed
and not the wooded river bank
where my son might learn to set traps
and catch a couple. Sure, he’d get cold and wet,
and see some pain — crumpled paw, black eyes staring back —
and maybe what it takes
to skin out forty bucks for the fur buyer,
or make a new collar
for grandma’s old coat,
still warm after three generations.
glandy stink and sleek brown peeks
from small rattling cages. Their long glossy twisting
gloved screeching into the gasser. Painless, the rancher says.
Then out to the pelting shed
and not the wooded river bank
where my son might learn to set traps
and catch a couple. Sure, he’d get cold and wet,
and see some pain — crumpled paw, black eyes staring back —
and maybe what it takes
to skin out forty bucks for the fur buyer,
or make a new collar
for grandma’s old coat,
still warm after three generations.
— Henry Hughes
Get More
We gotta get more out of her, my boss says.
Bulldoze, drill. Whatever it takes.
Drain the marsh, log the woods, and frack that friggin’ rock —
There’s got to be more. Find it!
I’ll talk to her, I say.
I’m giving all I can, she says.
There were fires and floods,
hurricanes and hemorrhages, sky-cracking prayers
and dirty mouths buried in shale.
Shit, the boss sweats. Gate the road, put up a fence,
and call the lawyers.
I nod and do, drive home late without my headlights,
sleep in the yard until the dogs wake me with their howling.
— Henry Hughes
Green Heron
Runt of the family,
overlooked hunch wading dusk
on thin yellow legs.
With your blue eggs eaten by the skunks,
there’s nothing left but
dropping bugs into still water,
chumming the shallows, spearing chub after chub —
fishing. Incredible! But where
to go from here?
Clever heron,
flying off alone, your kyow cools
the pond’s steamy cup,
and you don’t
look so green
to me.
— Henry Hughes
Who Can Blame Them?
The mergansers’ nest
smoked down the cabin chimney.
I didn’t know she was there,
didn’t know my heart could burn
like a bird.
Cold, clear rivers
and lucid lakes. Dark eyes
and serrated hunger — salmon smolt,
tender trout. The fishing club stopped shooting them,
but when I wade and cast, they still
skitter away. Who can blame them?
Sleek snowy drake, rusty crested hen.
Low croak, downy whistle.
They dive and rise from another bed,
swallowing bright silver,
my apology unsaid.
— Henry Hughes
Paintings by Richard Bunse
Paintings by Richard Bunse