Upgraded to Serious

by Heather McHugh

  the breeder called nonshedding. . .

  It’s a dog’s life I myself must lead,

  day in, day out—with never a Sunday edition—

  while they lie around on their couches like poets,

  and study the human condition.

  Glass House

  Everything obeyed our laws and

  we just went on self-improving

  till a window gave us pause and

  there the outside world was, moving.

  Five apartment blocks swept by,

  the trees and ironwork and headstones

  of the next town’s cemetery.

  Auto lots. Golf courses. Rest homes.

  Blue-green fields and perishable vistas

  wars had underscored in red

  were sweeping past,

  with cloudscapes, just

  as if the living room were dead.

  Which way to look? Nonnegative?

  Nonplussed? (Unkilled? Unkissed?)

  Look out, you said; the sight’s on us:

  If we don’t move, we can’t be missed.

  From the Tower

  Insanity is not a want of reason.

  It is reason’s overgrowth, a calculating kudzu.

  Explaining why, in two-ton manifesti, thinkers sally forth

  with testaments and pipe bombs. Heaven help us:

  spare us all your meaningful designs. Shine

  down or shower forth, but for our earthling sakes

  ignore all prayers followed by against, or for.

  Teach us to bear life’s senselessness, and our

  own insignificance. Let’s call that sanity.

  The terrifying prospect isn’t some poor

  sucker in a La-Z-Boy, inclined to jokes,

  remotes, or sweets. It is the busy hermeneut,

  so serious he’s sour, intent on making

  meaning of us all —

  and bursting from the tower to the streets.

  Man in the Street

  He claps a hand

  Across the gaping hole—

  Or else the sight

  Might well inside to

  Melt the mind—if any

  Thinking spoke

  Were in the wheel,

  Or any real

  Fright-fragments broke

  Out of the gorge to

  Soak the breast, the meaning might

  Incite a stroke. Best

  Press against it, close

  The clawhole, stand

  In stupor, petrified. The dream

  Be damned, the deeps defied.

  (The hand’s to keep

  The scream inside.)

  Mary’s Reminder

  An oddity of war

  (among the many) is:

  it has to educate attackers

  in the ones attacked, incurring, as war does,

  some counterswells abroad and then at home —

  two sides on every side. Our young

  are learning Arabic, and wrapping up

  their heads: hair-trigger in a Supercut.

  We’re struck and then

  instructed by our strife: the shades

  of difference between eleven, say, and twelve —

  trousers and trusses, toys and knives,

  a handshake and a landmine.

  God, you were a boy

  for all your life.

  Creature Crush

  I

  Dear God, if you ever were

  (and I have to go on being) alive,

  at least don’t make me have to see

  (forever in my mind as now on my TV)

  the likes of this poor

  furred familiar, hauled by neckchain

  to be eyeballed there in the public square in Kathmandu—

  this miserable monkey, made alert

  with a yank toward the knife of his keeper.

  Riveted, misgiving, every morning he is made

  to cry—nicked at the neck, so onlookers will register

  how sharp the situation is. But that’s just foreplay,

  because then the knife-arm does (what must inform his nightmares

  endlessly while other monkeys sleep) the drama of a three-foot thrust

  directly at the creature’s gut—so he recoils, of course,

  and has to freeze in that unthinkable contortion (neck hauled close

  to his tormentor’s gaze). They stay like that for an eternity. A minute,

  more or less.

  II

  The monkey’s quivering. Today his quick responses mean

  he’ll live to do another show. (Someday, like every

  other animal, he’s going

  to be sick, or sore, or slow—

  no sweat. Another monkey can be got

  with coins this monkey’s agony has bought.)

  III

  The people crane to see,

  not necessarily because they’re cruel—I hope

  they’re horrified—they do avert their gazes, now

  and then, but cannot keep

  from gawking once again. Myself,

  I wince from here. I am as apt to stare

  as any of my fellow men.

  IV

  Eventually the monkey is required

  to walk among the humans,

  pass a hat. Those who have cried

  give extra. (What’s the worse

  perverseness of this plan,

  the helplessness or the complicity?)

  Apparently I neither can

  release the monkey

  nor assassinate the man.

  NOCEBO

  Rather than this,

  I would gladly feel nothing.

  Give me some more

  anesthetic thing.

  My zoom control is set,

  it seems, on oversmall: all Hamlets

  and gloomlets. It’s a sin to hold

  unhappiness so dear, or dearness

  to a price, I know. Well-being ought

  to counterbalance misery, in all the universe’s

  mass. By Heraclitus and by God, across

  the range of states, the contraries should

  balance out, so suffering and satisfaction mark

  a single spectrum’s sore extremities. (The mind’s

  designed, declared De Vries, to keep the ears

  from grating on each other.) Oh but you, you

  screw the balance up, you human animal:

  of names the only caller and dropper, making

  scapegoats out of badgers, snakes, and grouse —

  they’re answering for you. And where’s my fabled

  freedom, if I cannot liberate

  the creatures of my word, the eye

  of my TV, the wiring of my house? What sense

  might the excruciated make, whose ravenous receptors

  (over veldts of happy elephants)

  flock to the one shocked mouse?

  Dark View

  The sun that puts its spokes in every

  Wheel of manhandle and tree

  Derives its path of seashines

  (Spiritual centrality) from my

  Regard. I sent it

  My regards. Some yards

  Of lumen from the fabrika

  Have come unbolted in the likes

  Of it, or maybe

  In the likes of me—a long

  Unweaving or recarding I

  Cannot recall begun—and there

  Before my eyes the palm

  Puts lashes round the sun.

  Tree Farm

  Tempted by restive night to make

  a festive figure, given each

  an ax and hour there,

  an hour before the evening

  news, the human beings flock to this

  still-living stand of minded pine.

  The shapes are perfect

  triangles. The range

  has been arranged to hide the wild.

  (But every old saw has a human child.)

  T
he little trees are planted from

  the blacktop to the fence. They can’t

  escape the blinking Santas or

  the hundred Rudolphs

  on the looping tape...

  Manned by some unsteady creature,

  one Dodge truck has backed into the crèche;

  and thanks to pigeons, several wise men are defiled.

  A city father and his son, who had

  to sit all day, have come

  from officework and school; they know the ways

  of pencil sharpeners: they press against their tools.

  Alas, the saw is dull, or bent; they dent the tree,

  they pull; it must submit. They drag it off

  against its grain, and up the stairs

  toward a gaping living room. There is the table,

  with its tethered bird. There is the woodstove where

  Thanksgiving’s trees were burned. The evergreen has

  got its hackles up, as otherwise it couldn’t mean to

  — spreads its arms across the jamb, and will and will

  and will not budge. That’s how a little grudge

  can shake enormous premises: one minute

  you are celebrating, and the next —

  your Christmas a catastrophe,

  your condo just a lean-to.

  Which Is Given for You

  A carnation the crux

  of the matter, heart

  close-read. The head

  not only minded: minding.

  Participles hot, thoughts in-

  sufficiently wooden: flow

  in the flesh. See notes

  on hand (the human being

  moving). Feelings aflutter:

  falls afoot: all healing

  failed, all hanging fought.

  They nailed him and

  they nailed him good.

  The River Overflows the Rift

  From every reach of field to come

  to gather in a clump, stock-still,

  as rain begins to fall to fill

  the hole where he is being

  lowered, lovers

  are allotted

  two feet each, whereon to stand,

  withstand, or just stand by

  the place he’s placed,

  here in the woods,

  in the world, in the

  moon-rid solar system.

  Humans do seem dim.

  But later little lights will rise,

  to float on something we can’t see,

  and pinpoints may be

  angels. (Or else hell has fireflies.)

  Before a human face

  a glance could light without

  alighting, gleams meander through

  the untagged trees, a stream into the pattern

  lend its thread. But then we came affixing

  barbs and snags, and until all of us

  are done away, a million lilies will be stilled

  by some arranger’s hands, a billion stones

  be hauled and heaped by heart, to stand

  for words, where words aren’t going

  to be kept. The word

  must move: the minute does.

  Its starred expanses dazzle

  humankind (wherever there’s a mind

  for wonderment). In time

  the glimmers of the uncontained

  outcourse even a lover’s frozen frown,

  the silver wave revives the mower. Glowers

  by glow are overcome, flowers by flow.

  The Gift

  From underwater you can’t see

  a thing above: a sun, or a cloud,

  or a man in a boat. You see

  the bottom of the boat.

  And everywhere below it—

  flocks of glitter, brilliantly

  communicating schools.

  You see the calm

  translucencies in groves, a sway

  of peaceful flags. Above is silver

  impassivity—reflective lid.

  So why look out?

  No out exists.

  The sky, each time it’s wounded,

  heals at once. A zippering across it

  instantly dissolves. A wet suit’s foot

  or a long black line behind a plummet,

  or the sudden angling boomerang

  (murre in a hurry to

  zigzag down) all come

  as pure surprises, passing thoughts

  that leave no afterimage.

  But we have lived above it all instead,

  our feet on the ground, our heads

  in the clouds, where there’s

  no ceiling sealing us from heaven.

  Drawn into every storybook of stars—the spark-lit

  universes, countlessness of dust—we think along

  those phosphorescent ways there must (the brain

  lights up a schoolroom rule) live others

  like ourselves—in worlds

  as mirror-mesmerized.

  As mine, let’s say, or hers. And so it was

  around the fifty-seventh month

  of her life’s underlife (a mindless blind

  metastasis of cells) we sent each other

  messages by e-mail, sudden, simultaneous,

  because of dreams. In hers, the ancestors

  were waiting, just across a lake, but she

  found no equipment in her

  circumstances of canoe.

  The paddle on the water

  drifted far and

  farther off.

  She saw it

  touch my boat, she said.

  She saw me shove it back, across the surface,

  safely to her hand, so she could get

  where she’d be found.

  Dear god, give me

  a faith like that.

  In my dream we both drowned.

  Not to Be Dwelled On

  Self-interest cropped up even there,

  the day I hoisted three, instead

  of the ceremonially called-for two,

  spadefuls of loam on top

  of the coffin of my friend.

  Why shovel more than anybody else?

  What did I think I’d prove? More love

  (mud in her eye)? More will to work?

  (Her father what, a shirker?) Christ,

  what wouldn’t anybody give

  to get that gesture back?

  She cannot die again; and I

  do nothing but re-live.

  Practice Practice Practice

  I know it’s unseemly

  to keep on grieving, go on

  sorrowing this way.

  It’s a presumption, some might say

  (since everybody loses someone,

  why should anybody claim

  to bear them all, all

  over, all at once,

  each day?).

  Unseemly to obsess

  on suffering, in such

  milieus, the top five

  tourist destinations full

  of dogs in hot cars, birds abandoned,

  toddlers come to understand they can’t

  be coddled from now on, and grown men,

  lovelorn, throwing up in bushes near the dance...

  (Even the King is lonely: the Enquirer’s lucre

  has seduced the page. Alas, he loved

  that bobbed, that bobbing

  head.) And in the under-

  funded hospice, there’s an only

  irritable night-nurse. In a home with a

  capital H, in daily and unfettered joys

  an idiot appears advanced. We wish

  we could, ourselves, slow down. Instead

  we get on with the show. Rehearse

  means Quick now, bring those big

  black limos back around.

  Both Sided Snipe at the Holy Ghost

  Jesus with a joke rifle. Cockiness before

  the cannonade. Do we feel

  better after? Feel

  which way?r />
  Are we not

  hard of hearing, who discharge

  so many rounds of laughter?

  Are we not ridden with it—riddled with it—

  friendly fire? Thank God we doze

  a couple hundred hours a month

  and dozens of those hours

  add up to make a better

  balanced life. (The all-or-nothings

  kill you after all—the shooter and the shot

  are kissing cousins. Respire, expire.

  You learn more than you earn. The only

  old gold is regret.) Instead,

  let’s lure the nestlings back, what do you say?

  Not blast each second thing to smithereens.

  Otherwise, active or passive, wired

  or winging (“live” or live) something

  escapes us—tertium quid, rarest of birds:

  our buckshot evanescence.

  There it is!—in every fray

  of oppositions, singing thirds.