Ingrid Hughes was born in London in 1945. She grew up in Greece, Saigon, and Singapore, as well as the United States. Since she was twenty she has lived in New York, where she brought up two children and now teaches English to immigrants and native New Yorkers at the City University of New York. Her poems and stories have appeared in magazines like Lilith, West Branch, and the Massachusetts Review.

Ingrid Hughes

Another way

At the graveyard I kneel by the reddish granite
of Aaron's footstone. How we struggled
to decide what it should say. In the end
we chose the words of Elizabeth Bishop
describing the sea: "dark, salt, clear, cold and utterly
free…" The stone is dark and grimy now,
fixed over the grave, utterly immobile,
except for the movement of the earth in space.
Scrubbing with a pine cone
and water Jay fetches from an urn
I scour away the grime. We rinse it
and I dry it with a handkerchief
and as we take turns reading I watch the polished
surface reflect the leaves shifting over my head,
satisfied that ten years later
I have found another way to take care of Aaron.