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Best Poems Written by Terry Hillen

Below are the all-time best Terry Hillen poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Actaeon's Ruins

Actaeon’s ruins
   (A pagan spiritual translated into the English)

Do not go with the boy with the beaver teeth.
Do not go into that goodnight
Do not go into the suburbs of social good graces
   of creeping affluence where your baby fat is ever young.

Come, slip the noose so satiny soft, so thrilling about your neck.
Come, Diana, from the kitchen of your maidens’ recipe.
Come back to the hunt, back to the wilds.  Come back
to the poetry of miracles where your heart pounds out of control.
Lose yourself in the chase … wherever it may lead, caution be damned.
Through the mud and lashing grasses there is a fount sublime and sustaining,
deep as your soul is pure.  It is there that I see you and catch my breath.
Catch the first breath of the first man that very first day.

Do not go with the boy with the beaver teeth.
I long for your scent to not fade away.

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Another Day In Dreamland

Another day in dreamland

Wake up.  Watch the sun ease in the light
like the day before, goin back, and on some more.
Cuddle with the reasons why while I collect
my unconscious back from the sky.
Okay, get up.  Go!  Gotta go.
Trip over some ratty old backpack.
Baby, what is this nasty old thing doin here?
What is this sentimental threadbare, nuisance?
Can we lose this ratty…look at these dopey patches,
fat Elvis in a Union Jack jumpsuit, laurel thorn crown…
Baby makes me wait until she is done with languid and stretchy.
And of course, then Zoomie has to get some, squeals too.
“What?
   Mmmmmhhhmmmm….
      What are you talking about?”
            Unh….talkin bout... unh, umm, my dream…I remember now!
Last night God kissed me!  Yeah!  Like that!
As I slept God leaned in close, breathed into my ear:
   “Love you best of all.
      Not for what you do
         but for who you are.”
I thought it was just a dream
but look at what’s in my bed this morning!

I need some caffeine and some sourdough.
I get in my Ford.  Henry Ford himself built it
Except it’s a big, fine Cadilac.  I mean ’67 GTO with 8-track
Oh!  Wait!  It’s a Mazda.  Where’d this huge iced tea/coke thing
Come from?  Oh no it’s gone!  What?!
That was a lifetime ago I ordered that.
Ah well, no one’s dead and I’m awake at last.
Oh, boy this is gonna be bad, pretty sure of that.
In fact, there are three little kids dead.
Not just dead, burned in a fire dead.
“Let us apply our Wit and Imagination”, zoom in shall we?
Oh!  Fuc…turn on the radio, there’s no need to be there yet.
“Choice.  It’s a matter of choice.  You can choose to see
the intrinsic beauty of nature and apply yourself to revealed truth
or hire some absurd topiary artist’’
Hit the button, Nevermind.
Later:
I’m gonna have to take this house down to the studs.
It’s a flash fire but that burnt, sooty scent ain’t comin out
     no matter how many scrubbings or ozone treatments
“Now, I know this is hard for you ma’am but
     in the room where your kids were found, unh, lived
You are gonna have to list on this paper here, unh, damaged contents
     underwear, t-shirts, shoes, socks, dresses, scrungies, toys, binkeys, pictures
How much it would cost to replace those things.  At today’s prices, with tax incl.”
     It goes on for a very long time, her silence
She can’t let go of the old time, double hung
floor to ceiling windows; that thin, fragile, ground floor
to ceiling glass which won’t require reglazing, just cleaning and paint.
I can’t let go of Professor Puffy’s advice:
     Tell her no big
     They’da never been great no how.
     Yo!  Wake up and get paid.
     Fill out the form, babe.
I think when you’re dead you don’t ever hear 
that voice anymore.  At least, I hope

Later, suddenly, I’m an old lady with big, baggy eyes and frizzy hair
My Valentine slouches over his pooch high wrapped in a polyester blend,
wiggles his eyebrows at me over sips of soup.
A glass of wine and I am the cat’s meow in my fur.
The little boy toddling by makes me smile.  I wave.
He waves, a new found trick.  Waves around the corner and goodbye.
I feel great.  Like part of some great secret that everybody knows and passes on.
And then Zoomie wants picked up.  It’s too long a walk to the car.
“I gotcha.  Up we go!  Home!  Wanna go home?”
Zoomie is all for that.  Me too.
We drive home real slow with the windows down.
     An ocean of soft cinnamon scented air swirls around us.
Soon we tumble into the arms of each other dreaming;
     very soon now, just as we’ve done all day.

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Bf's Girl

BF’s Girl

Man is identified by behavior.
I say man and she demands an
Accounting.  The definitive correlative
Can not be spoken.  The constant common
Can not be held in union.  I must discourse
All caveats else no communion, no love.
What of it?  I can stick a thermometer
Up her ass and she registers normal.
All biology, chemical registry, hormone
Therapy, cat scan technology yield
No abrasion any unguent could quench.
I say what harm I live and chose, too?
She speaks of a box she wasn’t raised in,
Impacts everything.  A falling body accelerates
Jubilant of nearing home.  Childproof or regret it.

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Here We Go Poof

Here we go poof
(From China with love)

I remember kids in America
at the Bank of America
in their baggy pants, baseball hats,
   tee-shirts.
There was snow on the mountains
   clouds in-pressing to get over
   dust the sagebrush with snow.
For the life of me, I think
   it was their shouting which
   held back or drew the clouds.
They on their skateboards
   taking turns with trick jumps
   over the sign:
      Absolutely no
      skateboarding
       or rollerblading
As if the freakish haiku of the admin made it tru…
There was more I would say but time’s up.
You remember Tiananmen, won’t you?
They are here now.  So long.

So long Huang Qi.
The Tao that can be spoken of
   is not the Tao which is.


               Just off McCarren some November
               (and all those miles away)

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Black, Blue's Dream of Knowing

Black, Blue’s dream of knowing

Today, eyes heavenward, an unclouded
blue unto eternity.  Look up.  Swim
this fathomless sea far as perspective
can carry.  Leave behind L.A.  Leave used 
shores brown as inversion’s earthbound air.  Out
past even the strongest of gulls.  Beyond
the reaching dust of wings, beyond soundings.
Here, no news of polluted bays; no news
of consequence of run-off.  Treated
effluvium of the massed means nothing
to us oared, masted with eyes unbroken.
Night, quiet eddy of the day’s blinking,
is not the domain of dreams for nothing.
Here, eyes unfocus fearless of shipwrecks.

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Invitation To a Garden Wedding

Invitation to a Garden Wedding

What temple of praise is it that we raise?
A Sunday church of sermons and duty
for souls whose altar craze may lose its blaze?
That which is of Love could lose its beauty?
A rose is not intent upon its scent
nor night the light whose absence is essence.
But if it were true would judgment relent?
Will chastened stone exult and rain fragrance?
Our cloistered pleasance, graceful and striking
in its aisles and tended devotions
christens blossoms of earth’s fertile Firstling.
But these blossoms grown wild are bastard sons?
   From what seed are we sprung?  Mary’s “I do.”
   Life weds grace; the Garden planted anew.

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Repair Shop

Repair shop

Worms and dinosaur blood, toil and fuel,
Doors I’ll hold for you.
Pure, old as moonlight, the marbled
Cloister of your pleasance I’ll affirm

They will come for your museums, my love.
They will come for your big, fine Cadillacs…
choke-weed and cottonmouths infesting gardens.
So what?  A fish bait fate this birth hook?

Before thought, beyond need, freed
Because of you, because love is thicker.
Tired of tending?  Offering?  Hoping a bite?
Nectar, somewhere, prevalent as air?

Seen it?  Have you?
The world, the worm turning?
Hungry?
Eat.

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Al'Z Hammered But Game

Al’z hammered but game

That life-is-death syncopation thang
     is how the master described old age
And there was nothing to be done 
     for it as the Maharishi Budh Moham Red
became a child again on his deathbed,
     lost the last remnants of control,
 his pants, biologically speaking
     and kicked the bucket, passed on,
disappeared…died.

Even animals feel empathy, just but observe
     the slaughter of their kin
So imagine my surprise at the Budh
     wisdom revealed, routinely, as I drove
for my meal only to be amazed by the
                         fact
that I could not remember what my home
      looked like, where it was, astonished
at the failure beyond my control.

Heaven is attained
     or is it decreed?
Exonerated by faith
     that somewhere in time I remember.
Haunted by my poor timing.


From Light Gets Bent Entering Water

Details | Terry Hillen Poem

Slow Zoom Out

Slow Zoom Out

…in those regions of personality which lie outside the orbit of normal consciousness the categories of time and space may be inappropriate and that man in his wholeness dwells in a space which comprehends infinity.
			F. C. Happold
He thinks he was not made to die
			Tennyson


An apple with a bite out of it.

An apple with a bite out of it lying on the floor.

Her hand with fingers stretched toward an apple with a bite out of it lying on the floor.

Her motionless body lying on the ground, her hand with fingers stretched toward an apple with a bite out of it lying on the floor.

They see her.  She is beautiful, even in death.  The world is a senseless nightmare.

Coming home from work, they can’t wait to see her.  How profoundly beautiful life since she arrived.  They see her.  She is beautiful, even in death.  The world is a senseless nightmare.  Her motionless body lying on the ground, her hand with fingers stretched toward an apple with a bite out of it lying on the floor.

If not beauty they can have vengeance.

If not beauty they can have vengeance.
The little men chase the hag until she falls to the earth dead.

They do not know the story is not over.

There is nothing to do but to go on with their lives.
They do not know the story is not over.

He toddles to me holding the world in his hands.

He toddles to me holding the world in his hands.
Will I play it for him?


Tsong
1/20/02 12:41 pm