Category Andrew Hidas Poems

                 THE EMPTY CLOSET

                   By Andrew Hidas

The suddenly cavernous closet
sprawls in front of me and stops my breath,
as if a street sweeper has barreled through,
and not knowing me from a leaf from a blouse,
has sucked all into its maw, its dark convulsive dark.

A black stain on the door frame
catches my blurred wetting eye
(her coat? her dress? did she have a black dress?)
and I reach to touch it, curious, my head bumping
the now empty hangers, setting them to swinging.

Their echo crumples me.

Half a wall of racks and a long row of
shelves are mine to launch this new life,
and I should weep for the freedom wrought
by their purchase, which I would,
were the price not so colossal and fierce.

“In my beginning is my end,”
wrote a poet more profound than me;
I trust he had it backwards,
and an endless beginning can yet be mine—and hers, too—
beyond hangers s...

THANKS GREAT AND SMALL

By Andrew Hidas

For the Mystery,
the X,
the source of comfort
and question (and cruelty)
and eternal longing and love—

Thanks.

For the leaf flutter,
the ant scurry,
the slant of light on my chair,
this chair, at precisely
5:01 (and 31.6 seconds)
on the afternoon of November 9th,
never seen again through all
the warp and woof of futures unknown—

Thanks.

For these friends
and that food,
the drinks to pair,
the touch of care,
the earth so fair—

Thanks.

For this branch of that tree,
for birds in the air,
a bridge crossing there,
the juice of a pear,
the glint of sun on hair—

Thanks.

For the flesh’s tingle,
(Ooh-uhh-huhh),
for locomotion and
vintner’s potions,
the glory of books,
the gifts of cooks,
all people, this person,
life’s call for immersion—

Thanks, thanks, thanks.

And thanks once more,
It is all in the giving—

Thanks.

***

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            WALKING THE GRAVEYARD

                    By Andrew Hidas

I have taken to walking the graveyard,
An oak-tree’d resting place
Under whose towering limbs
A treasure of autumn leaves and acorns fall.

Strangely soothing, this gliding above the dead,
Pausing to note a name, an age, doing the math,
Adding or subtracting my own advancing years in
A fruitless assessment of my place in line.

Fall’s fierce abiding beauty comes at a price,
Golden everywhere sans the dark abyss where it points,
Each October a plaintive call to arms and attention,
Open arms to love, that is, and attention to time, precious time.

Under every stone, a story of one who breathed, perspired,
Dreamed, questioned, loved, risked—and suffered, of course—
As I suffer when running hard up the hill from the potter’s fields,
Toward the stone monuments of nobles who lie there just as dead.

Breathless, I walk aga...

    POEM FROM THE NIGHT

           By Andrew Hidas

No heaven above, no hell below,
Just this, this bliss and thunder.
To dance beneath the diamond sky
(Sing it, Bob Dylan)
With both hands shackled tight
Sightless, deaf and mute,
No maps no roads
Traversing nowhere at all
Because you’re home already.
(With a long way still to go…)

Kindness is the core,
The coin of every realm,
Hippocrates said it once
And it’s worth saying again:
First, do no harm.
His other dictum worth our time:
I will abstain from every voluntary act of mischief and corruption.

Yet who are we without our dose of those,
The mischief and corruption, I mean,
Adam and Eve in the Garden,
Knowing not who they were,
Innocent and none the wiser for it,
Dull beyond measure until that fateful bite.

Self-knowledge is a ferocity,
A stare into the abyss of a
Life waiting to be built,
One brick and breath after another,
Be with me Sisyphus...