A MEMORY OF HUGHES

A MEMORY OF HUGHES

The landscape far
and near, verdant
and barren, healthy
and rotting black.

Mythologized to darkness,
the geology beneath
is there yet and unchanged.
Artesian words,

old water,
confined and squeezed up
by an ancient weight of sediment
in a well that floods the world—

to bubble up and
follow water’s courses
among us, back
to water, every drop

every he and she
took and gave since creation.
The landscape
is dark and light where

I used to see you.
Now I see
in the dark
conjured sunlight

brought by
an unintended self,
or in the inked
blackness, the

unspeakable spoken
burdens of the will.
Born I entered the ripples
after the atom was tossed,

back down
to where the faults split,
and the pond incinerates.