Hugh Fox is a noted scholar, avant-garde poet, memoirist and a founding editor of the prestigious literary award the “Pushcart Prize.” Fox is a member of the Somerville Bagel Bards, and has been a featured reader at the Somerville News Writers Festival. At 76, Fox is dealing with the cosmos, mortality, sex, and love, everything that has obsessed him since he cut his teeth on this stage.

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Everyday Shalom

When the family gang comes from Cambridge, Kansas City,
Ann Arbor, Brazil, the Moon, the grandkid brothers and sisters
I never had, and around Margey’s smile-eyes (“I just walked out
on him, he hadn’t really talk-talked-relaxed with me for about two
frigid introverted Parisian years”) all kinds of spider-web wrinkles,
Alexander a lot like old-times back fifty years juggler-jongleur
me, can’t just sit still and face the sunless snow but “Jack the
Ripper! Only after it’s ripped…?,” stuck on old Peter Lorre and
Orson Welles films, their Cambridge apartment a kind of museum-
archive of old beyond-horror films, and then Rebecca-Rivka looking
like Swan Lake, never a smile-stop, my cousin George from Chicago,
looking like a hippo-squirrel looking for a five thousand year oak
that will support his climbing (“Retired into mainly waiting to die
now, although my doctor’s optimistic about survival…I wish I could
go back and  get Sitting Bull off his ass….time to territory-it with
no fooling around!”), former  wives Nona and  Lucia gobbling down
the chicken and ham like they’d just come out of a Neanderthal
starvation cave, Marcella full of jewels and scarves, looking more
like twenty than fifty-three, “I want you to be around, Dad, around,
around, around, but not too round….,” trying to sleep afterwards,
sit-down, roll-over pains that never stop, remembering my oncologist-
urologist, “Cancer’s like an explorer. Columbus, the first  trip to the
New/Old World, ‘Where do I go next?.” no sleep but the next day
the eyes are still there and the rain whispers “Spring….hope you’ll
still be around to sprinkle on,” married to an aging Brazilian M.D.
who has slowly turned into Grandma Solace/Care, my eyes and tongue
hanging on to the forest backyard and Santa cookies as long as
they (liebe,liebe, geliebte) können/ can.

– Hugh Fox

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