Holy Week: Poems

By Michael Hugh Lythgoe and D. Audell Shelburne

Michael Hugh Lythgoe grew up in Evansville, Indiana. A retired Air Force officer, he holds an MFA from Bennington College. He worked for the Smithsonian Institution, and directed an educational foundation. He lives in Aiken, SC. His collection, BRASS, won the Kinloch Rivers chapbook contest in 2006. His poems, reviews and interviews appear in Windhover, The Writers Chronicle, Christianity & Literature, The Caribbean Writer.

Praise for BRASS: In the riveting, precise language of an experienced poet, Lythgoe not only probes the horror of war with uncanny clarity and insight but leavens it with exquisite poems about art and color (Larry Thomas, author of Where Skulls Speak Wind). Lythgoes poems are frequently in tense settings facing potential destruction, yet they seem to morph into the natural or the homespun without any sense of ironyalmost hypnotic sonority. (John Harris, editor of Praesidium)

Prasise for Holy Week: Shifting in remarkably spry fashion from gargoyles to bear-men to Degas to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to knee surgery to Ash Wednesday, Lythgoes poems read like a travelogue through one mans diversely lived and deeply considered life. His poems are at once serious, surreal, and sacrosanct. In his work, tragedy and triumph are inevitable bedfellows (case in point, the poignant and mournful Easter Sonnet). Returning is all about the leaving, he writes. At their most profound, these poems are poems of loss. At his most profound, he is a poet of redemption (Jill Alexander Essbaum, author of Harlot).

From the Foreward by Audell Shelburne: There is a Renaissance conceptknown as copiousness, a fullness and richness that comes when a poem is complete, expansive, whole. It gains in richness from the texture of the details. It adds depth through the insight and thought of a considerate, kind and intelligent poet. Lythgoes work is copious.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 11, 2007
• ISBN: 9781462814336

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Copyright © 2007 by Michael Hugh Lythgoe.

COVER PHOTO: San Xavier del Bac Mission

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Contents

WINGS

Flight Time

Riding In Kazakhstan

Ivory Bill’s Rondeau

Brass Reflections

Long Key

The Gargoyle’s Stare

Wings

After A Reading At The Folger Shakespeare Library

Gods On Thin Ice

Black Snake In Cherry Tree

Vulture Of The Ganges

The Narc’s Wife Blows Smoke

Talkman

Closing Wounds

Smuggling With The Dead

A Stone Map

Aviatrix

Leaving Killeen On An Eagle

LEMON LOUD

Kandinsky Rondeau

Degas At The Races

Memory-Keeper Of Cayo Hueso

Feast Day In Toledo

Rondeau: Girl With Cello

Wyeth Country, Overcast

Bonnard’s Blue Bather

Dental Appointment (2)

Palm Sunday

Anna Akhamatova & Amadeo Modigliani

Triptych: Manassas Studio

Georgia O’Keeffe Remembers Texas

Stone Carver

Blues Train

Ballad For Forsythia

Louise In A Lemon Dream

Painting Dick Tracy Into Heaven

Books In Al Basrah

THE LATE FORGETTER

Holy Week

Ash Wednesday, Roanoke

Joint Replacement Surgery

Stations

Walking Stick

Requiem On The Frontier Of Day

Chanticleer In The Caribbean

Easter Sonnet

April Near Beverly Mill

Lost On Harmony Way

Poor Butterfly

The River Remembers

Uncle Hugh, Shepherd

Hitching Posts

The Late Forgetter

Memorials

A Couple Breathing

With A Double Thread

Dedicated to my wife, Louise,

and to Liam Rector (in memoriam 1949-2007)

When I first met Michael Lythgoe at the annual Writers’ Festival at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, I had no idea he was a retired Lt. Col. (USAF) who had seen war first-hand in Vietnam. I did not connect this quiet, unassuming gentleman with the poet whose work I had seen in early volumes of Windhover. At the time, I couldn’t have imagined the depth of this man who finds words to the inner songs of being human in these complicated days. If you have ever heard Mike read, you can’t help but hear the passion lurking beneath the controlled delivery. He lets the words do the work, restraining the desire to shout in joy or outrage, to underscore how powerful faith must be to stand firm in empty times.

From the moment we take wing in Flight Time, the landscape seems foreign, alien. On one level, the poetry of Michael Lythgoe makes everything foreign. His travels through life have taken him far, and the geography of his poems is correspondingly exotic. If you throw in with this guide, you will cross the Ganges, the Rio Tajo, the Tigress, and the Rappahanock River. You will find yourself in the company of Bedouins, Ukukus, and Thai klangs. If you are a typical twenty-first century teenager, you will need an atlas or globe beside you as you read to help you locate Kazakhstan, Slepnyovo, Cuzco, and Cueta. But, no matter how foreign or exotic, the landscapes yield to Mike’s artistry, as his brushstrokes draw forth the familiar spirit in place after place.

Lythgoe brings the foreign and familiar together, creates a rich tapestry of life and lives, and he always brings you home. It is something to discover one’s home through the eyes of a poet, himself seeing the image through the eyes of an artist, only to find that you had never really seen your home at all. I did exactly that in Georgia O’Keeffe Remembers Texas. There I see Amarillo, its wonderful emptiness and separation of space with something / beautiful with sky blue at the end of the world. I grew up loving the horizon there, never conscious of