Pecan Grove Press Books of Glenn Hughes

"Glenn Hughes has written an exquisite and haunting cycle of poems exploring the mysteries of passionate early love and inexplicable loss. A deeply moving journey—tender and carefully wrought."

—Naomi Shihab Nye

Glenn Hughes’s poems have appeared in the chapbook Sleeping at the Open Window (Pecan Grove Press, 2005), as well as in such journals as Prairie Schooner, Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, and Poets West. He is also the author or editor of four books of philosophy, most recently Transcendence and History (University of Missouri Press, 2003). In 2008 he received a Fulbright Scholar Research Grant to study at the International Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO). Born and raised in Seattle, he later made his home in the Skagit Valley of Washington State, before moving to Boston for doctoral studies in philosophy. Since 1990 he has lived in San Antonio, where he is a professor of philosophy at St. Mary’s University.

"Glenn Hughes's remarkable poems transform ordinary moments into epiphanies. The smallest details become charged with depth and resonance. Complexities of love and longing, promise and loss, open into blossoms of insight, and we breathe a familiar and neccessary sweetness."

—Tim McNulty

ISBN: 978-1-931247-74-0 $7.00

1

Looking back, it was a fairytale:
I was bewitched by the eldest of three sisters
while you, at twelve years old, the youngest—
you were the charmed and waiting one,
blessed with a crazy beauty,
and fated.

Five years later you came to me
familiar but still unknown,
strangely, gaily bringing to me
the salt of the Mediterranean, and the dark
Sicilian labyrinth of your hair,
and whispers, clever assignations, charms,
your eyes brimming and closing,
wet with childhood, sailors, sea-love.

I breathed
the black waves of your hair,
your eyes were Eleusis,
your skin the beginning of time.
With every kiss I entered a legend.

ISBN: 978-1-931247-25-2 $8.00

Ignoring Buddha

Somewhere inside me is a true
                patron who has hired
                                proven scribes to
                                                work steadily on priceless

transcriptions, but this accumulation
                of treasure goes on
                                without altering my
                                                readiness to be bored,

bored like a child. Today
                while on the phone,
                                complaining about the usual
                                                indignities, I glanced out

the window the moment a spring wind
                sent hundreds of cherry
                                blossoms whirling, and turned
                                                away and kept on talking.

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1997-2003
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