Matthew Huff's Blog, page 3
April 14, 2017
Friday Family Bake Night (#2) – Strawberry Pie
For round two of our bake night, we decided to pick some strawberries together at a local farm and make a strawberry pie. While we were preparing it, we made a spontaneous decision to use the remaining strawberries to make jam as well. Trust us, it was an excellent decision.
Bake #2 – Strawberry Pie (recipe)… and jam
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Picking strawberries!
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Beautiful…
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Collecting strawberries for the pie
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These will go on top
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Making the strawberry whipped cream
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Finished!
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Very light and creamy
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Now, on to the jam
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Mixing with the sugar
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Rolling boil
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Strawberry jam!
April 12, 2017
School Poems
The air in study hall was thick with the smoke of pencils,
Scribbling to find fire on the page, ten teenagers
Looking for love in the smile their words might make.
Over in the library, some have rolled their sleeves,
Bent over a row of screens,
Their hurried breaths gyrating the pinwheels of their poems
As their fingertips clicked like cleats on the pavement of their laptops,
Letters dripping on documents,
A thousand rain drops on an old tin roof.
I walked past the boy on the steps with a halo of reverb
Plugged in from ear to ear, connected to a phone synced to his heart,
Drumming his palms against his knees like his life
Had been lived only for this moment, the wild abandon
Of one who’d learned to walk the plank
As the pirates of passion loomed behind him with their thick beards
And blades sharpened
As if to say, “Rock this one out or you’ll sleep in the ocean.”
The girl in the courtyard crooked one leg behind the other,
Curling her fingers around her phone in the cold
Like she knew the next message he sent would make her warm.
So she bubbled her poetry in blue, mailed it on the airwaves, and waited for his ellipses,
Three dots in Morse before three words she longed to read.
Down the hall, the kindergarteners knelt outside their classroom,
Upturning waxy bags of crayon and a dozen safety scissors,
Peeling the ghosts of Elmer’s glue from their palms
As they told their parents they loved them
With a red construction heart and a firm crease in the center,
A greater declaration of devotion than any sonnet could ever sing.
So I kept walking briskly in the air of this century
Where people still write poetry, breaking pieces of their body
Like bread for summer swans
And pressing them deep into a dozen syllables,
The friction of pounding feet and chattering teeth
As they toss their own words into the rushing waters of time.
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April 8, 2017
Friday Family Baking Night (#1)
So, the Huff house is beginning a new family tradition together: a weekly baking night every Friday (or, if Kristen is off, Saturday) evening with the whole family in the kitchen. It is our Friday Family Baking Night.
Kristen and I have been watching The Great British Baking Show together and wanted to try new baking recipes with our daughters as a fun evening every week. Happy is the home that smells of cookies, yes? 
March 31, 2017
Oranges
I slipped deftly into Botticelli’s Primavera one afternoon,
Begging the pardon of the Three Graces in white
As I wandered toward the orange grove.
The little cupid, bow at the ready,
Failed to notice the bent flowers beneath my feet
And my slow reach into the branches
Where I carefully felt for a perfect orange,
Tore the globe of skin from its stringy flesh,
And held the dimpled smoothness of the flayed world in my palm –
The shred of color,
The fragrance of gravity,
The naked hue of hunger.
Then, like my father before me,
I dug my teeth into the tender spot and, somehow,
I have spent the sudden years trying to dig myself back up.
March 25, 2017
Quick Plug for a Drip
[image error]If you are a fan of good coffee and good books (who isn’t, really?), let me recommend an excellent new blog titled The Light Roast. It is run by two young ladies who are self-described coffee and literature aficionados, and their chosen subtitle – To Bean, or Not to Bean – speaks for itself. With nods to Orwell, Hawthorne, and Tolkien sprinkled in their site, in addition to reviews of coffeehouses in New York, Atlanta, and Los Angeles so far, The Light Roast is a must-follow for anyone who loves coffee and wishes to invest in the local shops rather than the proverbial green giant (or siren…).
I recently subscribed and hope you will do the same!
Here are just a few:
March 15, 2017
Coloring
When God found me,
Wobbling my patched knees on the cobblestone of old roads,
We took a side street where
He beckoned me beneath the curtain of a tent,
Red and white, the blare of trumpets,
The breathless circus of all his grand design.
He showed me an elephant, and I sat down
Criss-cross applesauce
To marvel for half an hour.
Then he tipped his hat and pulled out a canvas,
Stretched in white like a swollen sail.
He dropped it in my lap and told me to
Fingerpaint my theology, make it as big as my grandfather’s shoes.
So he held my shoulder as I bent over my creation,
Pressed thumbprints and fanning fingertips
Smearing the colors of childhood across my makeshift doctrines,
And I looked up to see him smiling at me,
His eyes as warm as lions.
He noticed I’d drawn two bluebirds, gliding in the sunset,
And an old man sitting on a bench –
I said they reminded me of him, for only
A good and loving God could create a bluebird
As well as the old men who noticed them.
That night, God and I sat together, coloring,
Weaving our fingers along the grain of each new blankness,
Picture after picture,
Until he finally helped me to my feet and commended me for my coloring,
For to see the glory of God, we all must learn to
Dye.
March 4, 2017
“Students” [Video]
This is a reading of my poem “Students” from The Cardinal Turns the Corner, my book of poetry released earlier this year. It is dedicated to all of my students, whom I love dearly.
Enjoy.
March 3, 2017
Ludwig van Beethoven
It was just him and me that evening
In a dimly lit coffeehouse on the south bank of the Thames,
Like we’d somehow met halfway.
Though I knew the Atlantic to be wider than his short jaunt from Vienna,
I offered to pay for the drinks
As he was the one who soared valiantly across the stars of two centuries
To meet me, and I simply took an early flight and a cab.
When we sat down, I happened to glance over his shoulder and out the window,
Catching the London fog along the length of the still river
As if it had wandered straight from some
Penciled copy of Eliot’s poetry
Or a chapter from that Dickens novel
Sitting softly on the shelf in a used bookstore near Piccadilly.
But all I could do was ladle my mug with both hands
Like a beggar warding off frostbite
As I tried to think of what to say, desperately wishing to avoid
The stilted air of an interview
Or the false pretense of coziness, talking about the weather
Or something equally grey and dull.
Yet, in the silence,
As the moon held its head above the water of the gentle, pebbled tide,
I looked to his navy coat, his shock of famous hair,
And, finally, to his curled fingers on the table
As they drummed lightly beside his empty cup and the black dregs
Splattered like notes along the bottom.
They spoke for themselves
The way they’d spoken all those years ago
In the Moonlight Sonata, the riot of the Fifth Symphony,
The glorious Ode to Joy.
And now, strolling down the street into the marble cool hours of night,
I slowly attach these headphones
And choose his Seventh Symphony in A major,
The one he reportedly wrote to convalesce from the storms of illness.
And I carry two thoughts, one for each pocket,
The first, how beautiful the winter air,
The second, a quiet wish that I could tell him how good it is to know
He’s still got it.
February 22, 2017
Passion
Behind my open eyes, I took pictures of the lightning.
You see, I’ve got pitch-perfect timing, the shutter speed
Of eyelashes fluttering, stuttering through a thousand flashes.
And all the ribbons of this clacking typewriter in my ribcage
Spin faster than aging, ink hammers exploding,
Pumping blood just like it’s flooding.
So I pull back the curtained skyline, tear the North Star from its system
And grip it till it trembles, tremors shimmering like fool’s gold,
The cold charm of blindfolding a supernova in slow motion,
Surging through the paper-thin skin of my grasp into the bloodstream.
They say it’s not enough to have this engine
Raging in my iron bones,
But I’m so full of green lights, I’ve got Gatsby in my vision,
New York printed in my vein lines,
And I’m showing no signs of stopping,
For like that shining city, you know I will never sleep.
‘Cause this bonfire’s been howling, synapses hyper in the sparking,
Sending signals like embers
From my thoughts into the evening,
Till they burn from all this dreaming, decades in the making,
Taking laps around the circuits in my hands
As they seize lightning,
Rope it down and crack it open ’til I find the silver lining,
Write this poem before it blinds me, then rewind to the beginning.
Though these words may be my ending,
They may also be my living,
For that’s what passions do, they claim your life,
Like fire you just can’t take them lightly.
So let them course through every brainwave,
Even after my touchscreen flatlines,
‘Cause in ten thousand years, this typist will still be typing,
Writing on the pages of forever, etching metaphors for glory.
Till then, my lens is calling to open my eyes a little wider,
To fill my teeth with every whirlwind of dusk
And all this lightning, palms ready for thunder.
February 15, 2017
Little Icarus
Little Icarus stood by the wood chips.
He was twelve when both his wings broke, tangled up,
Trying to tear through the fabric of his polo,
Caught beneath the floorboards of his shoulder blades
As his cheeks flushed with shame.
He wore a slipshod buzz cut and chubby jowls that
Framed his braces and the crooked grin they fenced in,
Standing alone as yesterday’s rain lay simmering on the blacktop.
A blur of children sprinted past him, laughing,
And he buried his dry tongue beneath the dirt in his throat,
The stiffness of death in the mouth of a boy
Who never knew what to say.
Not a word about the jungles he’d seen in gym,
The knotted rope of humiliation and the sting of the lash
As the rich kid rat-tailed his back in the locker room
And all the cool boys snickered behind their elbows,
The cute girls giggling later over sandwiches.
But don’t you fear, little man,
For I have brought an army of book nerds,
Dreamers and choir singers,
Carrying their lisps and scars in rucksacks,
Glasses, buck teeth, and southern accents,
The boys who cry at movies and the girls who still have nightmares,
Walking our bikes over to invite you to our treehouse
Where white-out is outlawed
And your freckles are the confetti of God
Like He cut up the birthday cake of the sun just for you.
And together there, we’ll patch your feathers
And tell a couple of stories
Before we lean our heads back against the beams of our home,
Look up at the stars through the crack in our creaky roof,
And slowly drift to sleep.
