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Monday, September 05, 2011

To Hugh Fox by Lo Galluccio

( Lo Galluccio and Hugh Fox at The Somerville News Writers Festival)









small epiphanies you take me into your secrets

I'll take you into mine, rigid white sprouts of rich

decay....Inside fuchsia, 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

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