Hudgins and Transubstantiation

Andrew Hudgins ends his most recent book, Ecstatic in the Poison, with two autobiographical narrative poems. These are companion poems in the sense that one focuses the perspective upward into the sky while the other focuses downward into the earth. It is the first, "The Hawk above the House," that I find most compelling.

Hudgins uses the boy sitting on his father's roof to catch a moment in time that is emblematic of one of his major artistic preoccupations: transubstantiation. Whether it is the transubstantiation of the host or the longed-for exchange between the natural world and human experience, Hudgins is preoccupied with the alteration of substance within the static nature of appearance.

In the poem, the hawk considers a possible prey before it turns and flies away. The boy imagines himself in flight, looking down on the boy he was, wishing to think as the hawk thought. In his longing he feels only failure. The narrator, on the other hand knows, the power of imaginative transubstantiation and crosses time to tell the boy that he had not completely failed as he had thought.
The poem is divided into two free-verse stanzas of 19 lines each. The first stanza focuses on the immediacy of the boy’s experience watching the hawk while the second stanza reflects on the wish to fly.

The emotional energy is set in the poem by the way the spacing of the lines equates with the flight pattern of the hawk. In the opening lines, the hawk hangs in the air and is duplicated on the page in the staggered second, third, and fourth lines. In the fifth line, the arc of the flight is described with its instantaneous disappearance from view. The hang and glide dichotomy of the flight is maintained throughout the poem with modulation between smooth flowing syntax and the spatial pause.

The hawk is fully integrated into the elemental world of light and dark, space and time. The alliteration of "hawk hung low above the house" and the repetition of "prey" and "not" in lines three and four hold the hawk to the land, grounded in time, while the alliteration of "dawns and darkness" links the imagined experience of the boy to the agelessness of the hawk's pattern, the transcendence of the limitations of time. The soaring phase of that pattern is expressed by the "sun's arch," the "bright track," and the "sunlight above the stucco box." Through imagination, the boy is transubstantiated into hawkness and thus his orientation to time and space changes. From his new perspective, the house seems to be a stucco box that he sat upon, and the experience enables him to be both outside and inside his body as he watches "the boy who watched for" him.

In the second stanza, the compelling nature of the wish to fly is reinforced by the repetition of "he'd have given anything to fly" in lines one and seven. The synergy between predator and prey is echoed in the juxtaposition of the desire of the boy to fly like the hawk "exploding on the sparrow" and like the sparrow frantically "threading through the "black-green cedars." This same synergy exists between boy and hawk as the boy imagines "if he could imagine hawk thought." The boy's indecision is expressed in the repetitive form, the doubling of the negative, that duplicates the hawk's indecision about his prey in the first stanza, and the correlation is completed with the linking of "wings and cold predation." In that final realization of impossibility, the boy becomes prey to the hawk. He is vulnerable to the power of the hawk in the same way that the sparrow is. The repetitive wish links the hawk/sparrow synergy with hawk/boy synergy.

There is yet another level of transubstantiation worked out in this poem between the persona and the boy that he was. From the adult perspective, he is the same person he has always been, but he acknowledges substantive changes in his understanding of the imaginative experience. The shifts in point of view explore these changes. The first stanza told in first person explores the boy's pure experience of imagination. The second stanza moves to third person to explore the distancing of the core experience only to loop back like the flight of a bird to the immediacy of first person. The narrator transcends time to return and tell the boy that he has not completely failed "as he had thought." The boy who has become the man knows the reality of the imagined, that to imagine flight is to fly, at least on one level.