Andrew Hudgins

The Hereafter

Some people as they die grow fierce, afraid. 
They see a bright light, offer frantic prayers, 
and try to climb them, like Jacob's ladder, up 
to heaven. Others, never wavering, 
inhabit heaven years before they die, 
so certain of their grace they can describe, 
down to the gingerbread around the eaves, 
the cottage God has saved for them. For hours 
they'll talk of how the willow will not weep, 
the flowering Judas not betray. They'll talk 
of how they'll finally learn to play the flute 
and speak good French. 
                                    Still others know they'll rot 
and their flesh turn to earth, which will become 
live oaks, spreading their leaves in August light. 
The green cathedral glow that shines through them 
will light grandchildren playing hide-and-seek 
inside the grove. My next-door neighbor says 
he's glad the buzzards will at last give wings 
to those of us who've envied swifts as they 
swoop, twist, and race through tight mosquito runs.

And some—my brother's one—anticipate 
the grave as if it were a chair pulled up 
before a fire on winter nights. His ghost, 
he thinks, will slouch into the velvet cushion, 
a bourbon and branch water in its hand. 
I've even met a man who says the soul 
will come back in another skin—the way 
a renter moves from house to house. Myself, 
I'd like to come back as my father's hound. 
Or something fast: a deer, a rust-red fox.

For so long I have thought of us as nails 
God drives into the oak floor of this world, 
it's hard to comprehend the hammer turned 
to claw me out. I'm joking, mostly. I love 
the possibilities—not one or two 
but all of them. So if I had to choose, 
pick only one and let the others go, 
my death would be less strange, less rich, less like 
a dizzying swig of fine rotgut. I roll 
the busthead, slow, across my tongue and taste 
the copper coils, the mockingbird that died 
from fumes and plunged, wings spread, into the mash. 
And underneath it all, just barely there, 
I find the scorched-nut hint of corn that grew 
in fields I walked, flourished beneath a sun 
that warmed my skin, swaying in a changing wind 
that tousled, stung, caressed, and toppled me.