Babylon in a Jar: New Poems

These diverse poems of past and present, of order and disorder, press on with the forceful explorations that Andrew Hudgins began with his first book, SAINTS AND STRANGERS, a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 1985. The wide-ranging poems in this new volume respond with passion to the natural world, to family life, to history, to inheritance: "before he flooded the rubble, he swept up the dust of Babylon / to give as presents, and he stored it in a jar."

1
The Chinaberry 3
After Muscling Through Sharp Greenery 5
Poem ("Blunt daffodil spikes") 6
Ashes ("My left hand joggled Johnny's arm") 7
In the Red Seats 10
Edge 12
Dragonfly 13
Night Class 15
One Threw a Dirt Clod and It Ran 17
Signs of Change in Weather 18
Wind 19
Supper 21
The Daffodils Erupt in Clumps 22
We Were Simply Talking 24
Heaven 25
Elegy for the Bees 27
Bodies of Water 28
Babylon in a Jar 31

2
Catching Breath 37
Plunge 38
How to Stop 40
Ashes ("Bill gripped the can in both hands") 42
In Alesia 43
Rain 44
Purple 46
Ball 49
These Priveleges Doth the Wolf Hold to This Hour 51
Hail 52
Goat God 53
Plant Two Seeds 55
Keys 56
Hammer and Scourge 58
When the Weak Lamb Dies 59
Tools: An Ode 60
The Bottle Tree 61
Why Stop? 64
The Hanging Gardens 65
Stump 69

Acknowledgments 71

The Chinaberry

I couldn’t stand still watching them forever, but when I moved the grackles covering each branch and twig sprang together into flight and for a moment in midair they held the tree’s shape, the black tree peeling from the green, as if they were its shadow or its soul, before they scattered, circled and re-formed as grackles heading south for winter grain fields.
Oh, it was just a chinaberry tree, the birds were simply grackles. A miracle made from this world and where I stood in it.
But you can’t know how long I stood there watching.
And you can’t know how desperate I’d become advancing each step on the feet of my advancing shadow, how bitter and afraid I was matching step after step with the underworld, my ominous, indistinct and mirror image darkening with extreme and antic nothings the ground I walked on, inexact reversals, elongated and foreshortened parodies of each foot lowering itself onto its shadow.
And you can’t know how I had tried to force the moment, make it happen before it happened— not necessarily this though this is what I saw: black birds deserting the tree they had become, becoming, for a moment in midair, the chinaberry’s shadow for a moment after they had ceased to be the chinaberry, then scattering: meaning after meaning— birds strewn across the morning like flung gravel until they found themselves again as grackles, found each other, found South and headed there, while I stood before the green, abandoned tree.

Copyright © 1998 by Andrew Hudgins. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

Andrew Hudgins was born in Texas, raised mainly in Alabama, and educated all across the Uninted States. Today, he teaches at the University of Cincinnati, where he lives with his wife, the novelist Erin McGraw.