Upgraded to Serious

by Heather McHugh

  its roots back to an ash tree,

  and its branches up

  to an ash cloud,

  the club that let in and that disallowed

  the thought of so many—

  ingeniously giving members

  bullhorns for our little voices,

  leather for our liabilities of skin—

  the products of its expertises hooking

  dugs to suction-cups

  and penises to clever

  lover-tubes, docilities

  to stanchions—keeping the consumer

  from those messy overflows—oh yes,

  the clickogenic club—it’s now on its way

  out, going the slope of the oil- and

  cowmen, under a wave of nouveau

  spunk, as reproduction comes

  in plastic, tungsten,

  dazzleworks of circuitry—no

  boring boards! The club with all its antique

  codes and codicils will have to

  club itself out, out of courtesy, on the path

  to a virtually productive heaven—let the gentlemen

  agree. Their sons, the slackers with the liquor, hand it on

  to generation Z, that need not multiply or sleep. The stock

  of alphabets runs out, the line of swollen lifetimes hits

  the point of several seconds flat, and any smidgen

  beats a bludgeon. Just a blip behind the eyes

  works better than a bruiser with a bat.

  Unto High Heaven

  Most people trust in will

  and dream of power.

  The man of the moment would kill

  to be Man of the Hour.

  Most people live by asking

  daylight’s worth.

  My God, they’re multitasking

  everywhere on Earth.

  But to inherit it—

  my Liege!—don’t stoop

  to seek. Pass up the privilege

  of being meek.

  I Cannot Clear My Eyes

  On his chain in the merciless sun

  is a dog; on macadam a run-over cat —

  and what’s that moving mud

  near the murder of wheels? How can

  these crow-crowds bear their kind? The victim

  screeches in the flap but can’t outfly them:

  luckless, maybe sick. . . A relative of ours.

  It’s not that we lack luck or luster, family

  or sleep. But here at god’s own

  Earth Day barbecue we are

  the blackest sheep.

  Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork

  I love him so, this animal I pray

  was treated kindly. Let me pay as much as even

  greater pig-lovers see fit

  to guarantee him that. As for his fat,

  I’d give up years yes years of my

  own life for such

  a gulpable semblable.

  (My life! Such as it is, this

  liberality of leaves! The world

  won’t need those seventeen more

  poems, after all, there being

  so few subjects to be treated. Three

  if by subject we mean anyone

  submitted to another’s will. Two

  if by subject we mean

  topic. One if by death we wind up

  meaning love. And none

  if a subject must entail

  the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)

  Thous by the Thousands

  There’s too much gobbling

  going on. Gobble up the baby

  with his cheeks! Gobble up the girlhood,

  with its eyes. Gobble up the novel with its world

  and scoop the lovers up, to coop them in.

  After the gulletful, the lip

  is dabbed. No trouble.

  Just a single gob can multiply

  into a gobble’s worth—or one small rub

  into a rubbled history—the hag a whole

  damned marketplace. And one scribe’s

  nib? Well, after all, you get

  the point. Get out the bib

  (and lengthen up the eye).

  Take that—a double-handled cup! Take

  this—a clamor for acclaim. Throw in

  a fiddle for Fidelio, and for the little lady

  baby Bob, a nodding ornament.

  The gleam of insight dimmed into a glimmer.

  Our awe before a one-and-only

  bogged down into frequentatives. From the break

  in space and time—a crack across the priceless pottery—

  we crackled up production lines. The thunderbolt to shake

  your being’s very frame—the heavens’ way

  of sparking up a conversation—that

  got channeled down into white noise.

  We slept in letters, woke in stitches,

  toggled off and on. At last, forever

  happened: we appeared in Oz, on Death TV,

  where the illusions of expanded view

  could not diminish anybody’s hunger.

  Given an allowance, we began

  to spend eternity, all but agog

  in our designer goggles.

  Ill-Made Almighty

  No man has more assurance than a bad poet.

  MARTIAL

  The Logos thrives, it is crawling

  with bugs. The lecturers are teeming —

  memorific, futurized, dead-certain they’ll go

  unsurprised. They don’t know nows

  as we do, true to no clear

  destination. (We can’t even

  act our age: it’s over-understudied.) Steady

  as you go. The greatest waves are barely

  bearable, alive’s ill-

  read already,

  and the Skipper is sick

  of the terrible lit

  graffiti in the head...

  And the Greatest of These

  Stupidity’s no grounds for our despair.

  It drives or drowses everywhere—

  waxen, bristling, pitted, slick—

  as variously textured as

  notoriously tough. It ought

  arouse more wonder than aversion:

  cases most complex are hexed, and know it,

  while the simplest merely grin into the void.

  A sort of wisdom, either way, this

  being short on wit.

  Nor may despair accrue

  to humankind’s unsightliness—the humped one no one loves,

  the scrawny and the scrofulous, the pimpled and the pocked—

  who hasn’t lost all sight of beauty,

  once the beauty talked?

  I can’t lose hope over the way

  we tort as we retort, reveal as we redress—

  I can’t regret the spank of life, its sparkling

  more-or-less. Where heartlands lie the lowest

  (stream and meadow, desert, swamp)

  I trample on, I keep up hope

  at every everloving turn.

  Each turn, that is, except

  the wickedest: when cruelty

  comes cackling from its

  crackhouses in nature—hell

  must help me then because

  I lose all heart at hurt intended. Not just

  humans, after all, who massacre

  their cousins and their dogs. You’ll see

  the crows gang up as well, with bloody beaks and

  malice and intent, bedeviling some half-defeathered

  brother to his death; or, dashing out the kitchen door,

  the pampered shepherds lunging from

  the farm-wife’s kibbled kiss, and just for this:

  to fang the haunches of a fawn—not once

  but seven times (it seems inexpertise is all the more

  excited by the sufferer)... The heart

  must bear it all, apparently, or burn, or dim, as

  claw on claw the creatures in the tank

  go
scrambling to outclimb the creature crush.

  On days like that, when cruelty is king,

  and sun in swill appears to swim, I thank

  no lucky stars for life: It wants to take a lover

  limb from limb.

  For Want of Better Words

  You lose your

  grip, you could say.

  That handy bag.

  The ones you poured your life into

  were ripped away—their treasured senses,

  knacks of narrative,

  abruptly stopped

  with mud.

  So you get number—

  adjective that never should have been

  susceptible of the comparative.

  You are not faithful, hopeful, kind—

  are those the three? (The only three? so many?)

  Must the one be greater, as the Scriptures say?

  The buck cannot stop anywhere. Once gotten out of hand,

  it goes on growing in the mind. In masterworks of map

  the big fishfinders

  sweep the seeing globe—

  with people always

  coming out on top. One man

  professes to believe

  no hope exists where there’s

  no love: he opens up

  a sex-toy shop.

  Above it all, behind it all, beyond

  its all-or-nothingness, the only

  opening that counts—

  a countlessness the stars have stood for

  even as their senses moved—

  an opening the measurers adore

  because it marks the end of ends. And mind

  is mesmerized by such unfathomable states, past all

  high fives, deep sixes, and the wondrous

  horizontal eight—a nowhere

  faster than the newsflash,

  faster than the speeding hearse.

  You’re late in your

  one-upmanship,

  your craft, your

  universe...

  Space Bar

  Lined up behind the space bartender

  is the meaning of it all, the vessels

  marked with letters, numbers,

  signs. Beyond the flats

  the monitor looms, for all the world

  like the world: images and

  motions, weeping women,

  men in hats. I have killed

  many happy hours here,

  with my bare hands, as TV

  passes for IV, among

  the space cadets and dingbats.

  Myrrha to the Source

  O fluent one, O muscle full of hydrogen,

  O stuff of grief, whom the Greeks

  accuse of spoiling souls,

  whose destiny is downward,

  whose reflecting’s up—I think

  I must have come from you.

  Just one more cup.

  With the Moon

  March 26, 2007

  Utterly impossible for a person of some

  (how you say?) literary discretion

  to attack the blossoming

  goddamn cherry trees—

  and by attack I mean attach

  her ever overly-involving

  meathooks of admiring to them (mire and ad being alike

  inherently besmirching). He would never

  love me, for example; that was only

  a commercial break, while I was putting in

  a lifetime. Nature loves its laws

  above its instances. But Mrs. Christ

  I wasn’t born to be. (The dogwood made

  too many bloody claims on its Virginias.

  In its stranglehold of jurisdictions there was no

  West Hag or Northern Hussydale for me

  to hurry home to.) Moving,

  moved, without avail, by doubt,

  and wary of a human’s fondest hopes,

  I noticed that the slope was littered

  with the optimists. But as I lived I wasn’t quite alone

  in misbegetting love and mis-conceiving laws.

  Addictable to goods, one still admires the good

  while, full of will, we wheel upon

  a planetary whim, no more than

  incidentals in a sunscape: gravity-employees,

  tissue-issuers, and slaves of rhythm. It is utterly

  impossible to say

  how (charged unto combustibility) the cherry petals

  are not just a dummy’s decoration—something to forget

  ourselves in, paparazzi-flashes or perfumeries

  of pink. A jilter and a jiltee aren’t distinct

  inside the litter’s heap: their mothers indiscriminately lick

  the little nodes and navels. No, he wouldn’t ever

  love me, in so many words. He’d maybe lay

  a hand on me, asleep.

  The Song of Skeptomai Lou

  Old wives, I wish I could

  be one of you. Instead

  I am the born old maid.

  Old maid emeritus,

  let’s say—the squid

  whose erudition hugs

  too many clams at once—

  heart full of ink. With my

  verdichter’s digits, I could practice

  having crushes. But appetites for permanence

  went whirring on. So did the ring

  of close calls (all collect). Even the elders

  wrecked their roadsters, just to have one

  date with the tow truck. Drivers loved

  their doctors into deep intensive care—ah, why

  go there—old wives! I did remain intact,

  was checked, rechecked, racked up, A-plus—

  that’s better than perfect, right? That much,

  let’s say, is understood. (I’m speaking

  Old Grammarian, you’ll recognize,

  where something understood

  is something missing.)

  Missing Meaning

  The mystery of speaking every day

  So plainly from a face she cannot see

  Unsettles her unless she can forget

  The things she knows and sink back into

  What she means. (Her times

  Seem overfocused

  On the frame—wire-rimmed or

  Tortoiseshell—and nothing

  Taken at face value. The skeptic

  Backs his watch, watches his back,

  That much is given.) But

  The View-Master’s skewed

  By a hairbreadth or eyebridge:

  There goes heaven.

  Good Old God

  He’s a hoot, with his flips of the nickel,

  his penchant for law, and his playing with volts—

  let the lovers be struck! (It’s his joke, on our dime.) And by Jove

  what a backside he turns! And by gum what bedeviled

  expressions! A scowl full of thous, and the gene pool

  is shot. “Thou shalt flower for moments—and rot

  for the rest—being flesh, being given to

  lust. Say you wanted an ocean of

  feeling, or time? Here’s a puddle to

  come from, a crack and a crotch.” He’s a hoot,

  don’t you think?—there above the commotion, just

  finding the bright side, just

  winding his watch. . .

  Half Border and Half Lab

  Customs and chemistry

  made a name for themselves

  and it was Spot. He’s gone to some

  ou-topos now, the dirty dog, doctor of

  crotches, digger of holes. Your airy

  clarities be damned, he loved our must

  and even our mistakes—why hit him, then,

  who did us good? He’s dead, who ought

  to be at home. He’s damned

  put out; and so am I.

  When blue is carried through, the law is red.

  When noon is said and done, it’s dusk again.

  The greed for table makes the greed
for bed.

  So cave canem, even stars have litters—little

  lookers, cacklers, killers. . . Morning raises up

  the hackled men. (Among our ilk, what’s milk

  but opportunity for spillers?)

  He saved our sorry

  highfalutin souls—the heavens haven’t

  saved a fly. Orion’s canniness who can

  condone?—that starring story, strapping blade!—

  and Sirius is just a Fido joke. No laughter shakes

  the firmament. But O

  the family dog, the Buddha-dog—son

  of a bitch! he had

  a funny bone—

  Domestique

  Surfaces to scrape or wipe,

  a screwdriver to be applied

  to slime-encrusted soles, the spattered

  hallways, wadded bedding—and

  in quantities astounding (in the corners,

  under furniture, behind the curtains)

  fluff and dander spread by curs