HULL STORY

Since the first of them, in November, 1504,

Pulled a stuborn thorn from a saint's paw

All Hulls, even the most unwilling ones,

Have gone the quickest route to Heaven.

(You thought that all saints were human?

 Believe me, if God becks a finger at you

It is worse than useless to tell Him

That you're a performing bear)

Accordingly, when the stonemason

George Washington Hull died much too young

Of acute silicosis there were no lines for him

Nor any papers to fill out in triplicate.There was

However, his first wife, though he'd been married just once

To a woman who was still living and not even ill.

He had told Mary and Margaret, his daughters,

Stories of finding Sabrina, a woman of the wild

From the most ferocious corner of untamed Ohio

And traveling back to civilization with her

On the way, their adventures multiplied

But Sabrina was dauntless and the wilderness

Always greatly respects dauntless women.

No canyon was to wide to be leapt across

No mountain too tall to tunnel through.

Rattlesnakes bit their own tails when they saw her

So they could roll more swiftly from her path;

If they thought she looked glum, grey wolves

Would gather around her at night to tell her jokes;

The Great Midwestern Sabertooth Armadillo himself

Lost two falls out of three when they thumb-wrestled.

Even in stories the Hulls have impeccable morals;

If George was going to spend years crossing Ohio

There was nothing for it but to marry Sabrina

(Mary was skeptical about the officiating tree shrew

But her father insisted it had been lawfully ordained

By a breakaway faction of the Southern Missouri Synod)

Though Margaret asked repeatedly, he never said

Just what had finally happened to Sabrina

He simply looked solemn and said that story

Could only be told at exactly the right moment.

But he’d coughed himself out of his body

And, as a Hull, popped into Heaven

Before the right moment came.

And there was Sabrina, coming in too.

They tried to stop her at the door

The quota for fictional people, they said, was filled

"Whether I am real or not, I was married

To George Washington Hull so I am Sabrina Hull

And Hulls go direct -- no detours  -- to Heaven"

(This was before Lucy Stone had discovered

That a woman might perfectly well keep her name

No matter who she married, so don't blame me

For my strict adherence to demonstrable truth).

A woman who has heard the jokes of wolves

Is hard to gainsay; when she is a mistress of logic too

There is no just no stopping her.

             Of course,

The other Mrs. Hull showed up some years later

But, though sometimes sniffing at tree-shrew marriages,

Life in Ohio had taught her how to share.)