Titles

""

Andrew Hubbard was born and raised in a small fishing village on the coast of Maine.

For most of his career, he worked as the Director of Training for a number of major financial institutions. He is a well-known speaker on the topic of corporate training, and has authored three books and dozens of articles on the subject.

He is a former martial artist and competitive weight-lifter, a casual student of cooking and wine, a gemologist, a collector of edged weapons, a licensed handgun instructor, and an avid outdoor photographer.

He graduated from Dartmouth College and Columbia University, receiving awards in Creative Writing and Psychology. He has multiple degrees and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing.

He currently lives in rural Indiana with his wife, two Siberian Huskies, and a demon cat.

Sample

Music From Stones

Stones can sing
And at certain times
Under certain circumstances
To certain people
They do.

If you love,
Or more,
if you entertain
Memories of love,

Love that emphatically was
Or even love that could have been
But was checkmated
By rude fate
Then listen correctly
And these stones

[These: they ring a pool
Where the almost full moon floats
And a little girl
Practices magic words
With a patient father
Always humble
Always feeling His children give him
More than he could possibly return]

These, I said,
Will sing to you
Of things stones know
Of durability against time,
Obdurate selfness,
Sensitivity to cold, to heat,
To things stones care about:

Arrangement, respect
Being of quiet service:
Singing a song so few can hear
And even those who hear
Unknowing of their hearing

Only saying to the little girl
“Let’s sit here.
Here on the rocks, I think I hear the moon.”

 

Old Post

Leaning from the wind
Like an old scarecrow
This fence post—
Last one standing
In a field no more a field,
On a farm no more a farm –
Pokes his ragged gray self
To the first streak of sun.

The tangled growth around him
Dips to the stroke of sunrise
And like a miracle,
A bluest morning glory
Has chosen this post,
To wrap itself around
And lift its trumpet mouth
To tell us what it knows
About unselfconscious energy,
The will, the becoming.

 

The Space Between Beats

The too-big grandfather clock
In the too-big room
Of the too-big house
Wheezes itself up to another hour.

Begins to strike
Its measured sonorous notes
For eleven post meridian.
The day almost done its particulars.
The notes strike a chord
But more eloquent
Is the ringing silence
Between each stroke.

A threat unspoken
But more foreboding for that
Of longer silence
Threading out
To a great destitution
Of time: None left for us.

How did it happen?
Where did it go –
Was it in the grocery bags,
The parent-teacher conferences
The Halloween dress-ups
The endless loads of laundry and dishes?

Maybe it was the birthday parties,
The unfinished photo albums,
The leash-tugged, late night dog walks
Shopping lists,
Christmas lists,
Death march procession of bills.

Dirty coffee cups
Empty beer cans
Haircuts, dentist appointments
Check registers shoved in drawers
So jammed they never shut right.

The first appalling gray hairs,
The pains you instantly hope
Are just a momentary mistake.

The faint lines
Then not so faint:
A roadmap to a reckoning
Of strange duality…
Inevitable but incomprehensible
Foreknown yet inconceivable.

 

We Were Boys

We were boys
And we found once in the woods
A headstone-shaped slice of granite,
Man-sized, the only rock around.
It lay on its back in a bed of moss and lichen
In a dense wood of evergreen and birch.

Gold and blue-green
The lichen veiled its surface
Yet it seemed to us its roughness
Was chiseled with lines and suns
And things that could be fish or sails.

We were boys
We stood on the rock
Scraped at the lichen with our soles,
Ran fingers over the abraded surface,
And went on to other things.

The earth and moon danced on
A score of years.

Now I couldn’t find the place.

Now I doubt and wonder
If rain and sun and frost
Had roughened the stone
And the rest was all imagination.

Or maybe not,
Maybe that hard tongue
Had much to tell
Of those who came before:
Their triumphs and their trials.

Evidence and probability
Suggest frost;
Romance and wishful thinking
Go another way –
Suggest far warriors
Pridefully chiseling their deeds
Into hard, hard stone.

Heroes. They were heroes.
And like heroes
They shared a little,
And left us mostly questions,
As heroes do.

 

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