Flowering Off the Chrome is a collection of symbolic poetic projections into the rural landscape. Removed from the urban sprawl, set during midsummer and narrated through a series of dramatic monologues, Hughes has created a rich sequence of see-sawing yarns about the comings and goings on a farm he knew as a child. Looking back through the eyes of an old man who chose to remain and work the land, Hughes confronts the genius loci and the idea of home. It is unusual to find such a young poet plying such a rural path, but these playful and well cured parables succeed because they germinate from a wistful charm. Galvanised by the work of poets dating back to Virgil and colloquially owing much to Robert Frost and Edward Thomas, Hughes asks what is our relationship to Nature? What is it that we nurture there? As with all of Hughes' work it broods with tenderness and chooses solitude as a tool of illumination. As always, a vigorous undercurrent of restlessness floods his language.
Flowering Off the Chrome
John Hughes
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2000 John Hughes
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Cover Art: 'Calm Before the Storm' Hans Thoma 1906 photographed by John Hughes
Dedicated to Hunter's Farm
Table of Contents
About the Hive
Say What You Mean to Say or Don't Say
In the Wind on the Furthest Field
I Have Thieved from the Rills this Burr of Bread
I Stepped Down the Last Few Rungs
About the hive the lattice of rooms had again to be gilded.
Among the lush green vetches the superfine horn echoed,
summoning the workers to return. For endless days the orchard
had dangled its bed and breakfast signs, the bees before the stilted
flowers, wisping pollen into the thermals. They had to fashion
a factory dance before her majesty's wings that would
reach far beyond any backyard dog bark or crow caw could;
carry, scout and frisk through the psychedelia for a passion
that thrush and blackbird yearn for. They were bound
to be up long before the cock's crow or lark's alarm,
scouring the dew flooded fringes laden with alms,
assurance,that to bear witness I would swear blind
the nectar was embargoed. In the penthouse suite
the drowsy queen, sipping from white roses in her dehydrated dream,
drooped, jarred in time. In the weir of light the arriving drones
bowed as if to a mirror, admiring their Latino lover's technique;
prancing, prodding and probing the act of procreation.
'You're only as full as a pillow with feathers, so dream on',
they chided, perfuming her with pollen until she was gone
in a shroud of kisses. She was a volcano of passion,
part mountain, part continental drift, churning out
what comes clotted under sweet skies. Pleased
by the old way of nuzzling in the earth's fleece
these slaves scaffolding cones, place the slingshots
molten into the pentagrams, their drunk well shadows
having slaked from goblets the sun's stilled flames.
Like seasoned lodgers lost in a labyrinth of flora, chained,
capable of patient navigations of the mute meadows,
oiling the seeping garden, risking its open sluices.
But the strength that stuffed their ancient matrix
lay marooned upon midsummer's musty mattress.
I combed the silt of their reservoir for juices.
but the hive that once dripped and glowed with amber,
slouched inanimate on the ground. Inside its cracked skull the debris
of the queen's rein pooled in goo. Abandoned yet somehow pulled free
from social obligations, my mind throbbed there all that sticky summer.
Say What You Mean to Say or Don't Say
it at all, father began to say one day
as we washed the dust off at the trough,
our hands bonded with the buttery clay,
the sun still warm on skin. Rebounding off
windows, brick and doors it fed the way
his parched heart far into the silence
flooded. I admired him for like a plucky
thorn he pricked upon my conscience
and rose above the wind, his stubborn voice
goading the books that I dared to read.
In his eyes my words became whetted, choice.
A string of midsummer thoughts would come to mind
but I, so undermined, would tear into the boundary
walls that he had built around what I did not care
to be behind. “The law”, he would wearily
state, “was to forget how filthy your hands are.
Do not regret the honest lines spun out in hours
heavy with hot air. Let others smother the seasons
sorrow. Listen well to me for once. Power
is passed on from the father to the son.
Let it surge in your brain like a river's flow. Pretence
and reality become as black as that bloody
ink, and if the truth be known, I have sensed
more mercy in a starving child's limp body
than in any rhyme strung across a page.
You feel that there is more truth in anger.
No one has the right to preach at your age
about solutions to questions. There are no answers.
Eat books and words. Put down your last
few tangled yarns to set the spirit free. Grind
your pen before the harvest if you must
but it cannot reap what grows in our ground.”
He has been called this on account of him
living outside like my trusty tractor.
Pounding through the long harvest hours
I wonder about the power of his engine.
I steer him out with a simple brass ring,
his nose playing tricks on me like double vision,
my temper or the season's rains. The prison
bars of Ferguson's eyes going into orbit rang
the church's bells once, freedom
like lightning arcing in his exploded core.
Those regal shoulders commanded the rains to crush
his enemies that ruddy day. But I am certain he has become
the difference when the milk has turned
sour in my mouth, when the stench
of anger has held up in my clenched
fist the moss of a roof. Though I may never earn
the kind of respect he has been given
by the women folk of the village,
I look on him as if he were an adage
or argument at the pearly gate of heaven
could not settle on. He is the chicken and egg that oxen
fed mountain. Going today to spike the spuds over
my boot’s leather heavy with dew after crossing the clover
field, the bells chimed upon the gates, and Ferguson
stood fast there like an old bridge. He was chewing on the cud,
grinding his teeth unto an axe edge. The rising sun against Mammon Wood,