Wednesday, September 07, 2011

My dear friend and prolific poet Hugh Fox passes on

To Hugh Fox

small ephphanies you take me into your secrets
I'll take you into mine, rigid white sprouts of rich
decay....Inside fushia, the world streams, monkeys
across the stone faces of god.”
Hugh as Connie Fox from Blood Cocoon

There we are cheeks pressed against
each other --- your round baby face
and blue eyes crowned by a cap and
me blowing a pink kiss with fake fur
thrown over shoulders. November
and you read at the Somerville News
Writer's Festival about your grandson.
You and I have been affectionate pals
ever since you called me a vampira
from reading my first chapbook
“Hot Rain.”

I think back on all of your work I
have devoured and reviewed with such
pleasure, always amazed at your cosmic
wonderment and lush and clashing
details of earthling
activites. You were enamored of feminine beauty
and dared to become a woman
yourself with lacy tights and lovers. You even
gave her a poetic voice.

We traded music and reviewed each others'
styles....your cat-like playing on the piano,
lifting from each composer the swatches
of genius you wanted to invoke, and then
you writing up my “Spell on You” and
naming me a new Marlene Dietrich for the
velvely smoothness you generously heard
in my voice.

You investigated traces of the ancient
gods, a unique authority on pre-Columbian
American cultures and the green unity
of all things.
Ganesha, Moloch, the Buddha, Yama –
your fascination with the gods sparked
thunder in your verse. You were never
afraid to reach up and outward to over-
turned stars. In “Way way
off the road” your most authentic travelogue
memoir you recounted the “Hippy, Post-
Beat, Flower-Children, Invisible Generation,”
of which you were a member.

In “Defiance” – the book with the howling
fox on the cover you wrote:

“I was more beautiful than Beauty herself,
but more beast than the beasts in the forest,
far from my friends, the poetry that a bird
that never comes to sing in my brain, seventy-four
years of Bach, Holst, The Little Girl
with Honey Hair, now clouds, everything clouds,
and when there aren't any more, the hand of Nothing
touches my shoulder,
“It's time to
become a cloud.”

You are a cloud In Michigan and a star
in Paris and a mountain in the Andes
and a red flower in Brazil.
I remember you with the pigeons around
us at Au Bon Pan in Harvard Square –
you always scribbling poetry and
conversing with strangers to make
them friends. I am grateful the
suffering is over and know that you
dreamed into your death like an oracle.

You are forever in our hearts.

Lo Galluccio

Sarah Hannah 1967-2001

STRANGE ANGELS

STRANGE ANGELS

Laurie Anderson The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin) lyrics


"Hansel and Gretel are alive and well And they're living in Berlin She is a cocktail waitress He had a part in a Fassbinder film And they sit around at night now drinking schnapps and gin And she says: Hansel, you're really bringing me down And he says: Gretel, yu can really be a bitch He says: I've wated my life on our stupid legend When my one and only love was the wicked witch. She said: What is history? And he said: History is an angel being blown backwards into the future He said: History is a pile of debris And the angel wants to go back and fix things To repair the things that have been broken But there is a storm blowing from Paradise And the storm keeps blowing the angel backwards into the future And this storm, this storm is called Progress."

Laurie Anderson The Dream Before (for Walter Benjamin) lyrics




Tony on Sherman St.

Mary Louise Parker

Mary Louise Parker
Good Witch of "Weeds" TV

Goliath's Head

Goliath's Head
Caravaggio

MEMORIAL DAY by Lo Galluccio

I might have stood with my Mother

on Sparks Street cheering the veterans of America’s

just and unjust wars

march past,

weeping for my Dad who died

jaundiced in the infirmary of society

not on the opera bloodied battlefield.

Instead into the cold confines of

film spectacle to see young Scandinavians

wrestle with writing and go mad,

jumping into the cold cobalt sea

off Oslo piers--

Two days ago Caravaggio’s dead Madonna

in crimson cloak crossed my mind as a Reiki healer

pulled my ear lobes. The church rejected

her because she was so heavy and lifeless,

daring to lie there dead,

not asleep for ascension’s sake--

That day I left behind my watch and black wrist band.

Strange, he’d made me undress--

the badboy of the Renaissance who loved his sword

and put his head into Goliath’s -- eyes bulging

with crazed fury, held by David’s victorious angelic fist.

To be today, not to be seen, to swear allegiance

to something else.