Allen Hoey passed away Wednesday, June 16, 2010, between the time he submitted these works and their publication here on June 19.

Hand

O gracious Father, who openest thine
hand and fillest all things living with
plenteousness…
—THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

Extend your hand beyond the door, beyond
the warmth of furnace and glow of fireplace, out
where the night winds chap the flesh and make
cold spread your body’s length. Extend your hand
and let the snowflakes settle in the dark, in the slight
breeze that spirals the flakes in the shards of moonlight
flickering between clouds that gather and scatter,
gather again. Extend your hand and let the darkness
rest in your palm, the plentitude, let the slight
spray of starlight exaggerate the hills and furrows
lining your hand, the world in miniature, hills that
rise beyond the pond invisible in the night, beyond
those hills the river, then the hills beyond that, the trees
and all the fruit waiting in their limbs to urge
outward, to press themselves furiously into light.

Ta-Da!

When I was slightly more than a sliver of bone
padded with a scrap of flesh, I could easily
slip into a shadow and avoid the dazzle
of scrutiny and just as easily slide back
fully into light, each hard facet glinting
like a crystal goblet of Côtes du Rhône
I might carry like a bleeding grail through
my milling colleagues at a holiday party.
Bearing a more substantial load of this
material coil, the trick grows harder,
except that who can tell what lies behind
the mortal disguise of excess and snowy beard
standing to one side of the room? The wash
lights fade and the Fresnel comes up. Watch—
nothing up my sleeve. I can make a full
bottle of wine disappear, I can cause
inexplicably (watch, watch) a marriage
to vanish into nothing but loss. Acrimony,
alimony, and recrimination. And who stands
shuffling and stumbling in the softened glare
other than a man who feints to the left,
to the right, soft-shoe and slow fade—
the only thing left the trace of a rueful smile.

Allen Hoey has published six collections of poems and three novels; Once Upon a Time at Blanche’s is his most recent collection of poems. His 2008 collection of poems, Country Music, was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. His other books include A Fire in the Cold House of Being (selected by Galway Kinnell for the 1985 Camden Poetry Award), What Persists, Provençal Light & Other Poems, and The Precincts of Paradise, all poetry collections, and Chasing the Dragon: A Novel about Jazz, Voices Beyond the Dead, and On the Demon’s Trail, a mystery. His poems and reviews have appeared in numerous journals, among them The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Hudson Review, Poetry, Shenandoah, and The Southern Review. His poem “A Thousand Prostrations” was included in Essential Zen (HarperCollins) and another poem, “Essay on Snow,” was included in The Best American Spiritual Writing of 2004 (Houghton Mifflin). In 1993 he accepted the Precepts as a Rinzai Zen Buddhist. He was 2001 Bucks County Poet Laureate and currently serves as Director of the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program. He received a 2002 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Fellowship. He lives in an 18th century stone cottage on an old horse farm with a view of Bowman’s Hill.