Upgraded to Serious

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Upgraded to Serious Page 4

by Heather McHugh


  No Sex for Priests

  The horse in harness suffers:

  he’s not feeling up to snuff.

  The feeler’s sensate but the cook

  pronounces lobsters tough.

  The chain’s too short: the dog’s at pains

  to reach a sheaf of shade. One half a squirrel’s

  whirlingthere, upon the interstate.

  That ruff around the monkey’s eye

  is cancer. Only god’s impervious:

  he’s deaf and blind. But he’s not dumb:

  to answer for it all, his spokesmen

  aren’t allowed to come.

  caelum bibere [drink some sky]

  LUCILIUS

  Boondocks

  We come from there—that

  clattering tautology. The boon’s

  the boom—what lowers a load

  from the tottering sky;

  the dock’s the planks and pilings,

  strictness of the structures made

  so we can walk on water, put

  these franking footholds on

  the riled-up rookery; the dock’s

  the bracing that the boat is lashed to:

  tarry trunk, and tacky creosote.

  An orange star attaches to a moment,

  waves toward a slo-mo lobe.

  A finger’s inch outruns

  a yardarm’s reach—the boon’s

  the rope, the slip, the pilings, and

  the sound. We come from there,

  and we want more. Another ton

  of sky-stuff winches down.

  Nothing Is Too Small

  We have turned,

  we can’t help it,

  the sheer horror of it

  to a story we can put

  in a hip pocket, put

  behind us, let us say,

  so we don’t have to

  suffer ceaselessly.

  But the soul requires

  some toll of the eternal

  to be taken. There are traces

  of the heightened feeling here

  and there: a whole year later

  someone can’t forget

  how one of her feet was naked —

  and the threshold where her temple rested

  should have been swept better. Even five years

  haven’t taken out of someone’s eye

  what showed up in the streaming

  whirlpools to one side

  of that particular

  TV (the second plane was

  plowing through its high-rise): there

  a speckled harbor seal

  had raised his head up

  out of the current’s fastest flow, and

  stayed the longest time,

  just looking all around.

  As if amazed at how things stand.

  Or maybe how they go.

  Moving Walkway

  I would have stood for memories

  if memories would will it.

  Memories would not. They flew

  from every stronghold

  and immediacy staked its claims—

  in featherdusting wind, in watercolored name,

  in waves of genotype. Ungovernable

  polymorph, the flow was disinclined

  to be revised, or be reduced—could not be boxed,

  could not be kept, for carrying to other

  spots in time (posterities to go, or

  merriments to come). One step and we

  went meters; seven more, and we became

  pure haste: fastheaded, leaving all

  steadfastnesses behind, all tendencies

  of centuries toward

  the halted hallways, marble men.

  Thanks for That Last Heartthrob

  Little being moved,

  at last, give thanks.

  One doesn’t want

  always to be bound

  to change.

  And whether by weathers

  (the ins and outs of them)

  or by bloody bulldozer

  (who lullabied that baby?)—

  whether by nature’s nature

  or your own (O man, you draw

  a fine damn line!)—it hurts to be

  at a mercy, or a wit’s end. (Few believe

  the wit’s end hurts—or any part of it, for that

  sad matter. Utter folly, once

  such errors have begun,

  the big being moved

  most of all, after all,

  by the littlest one.)

  Leaf-Litter on Rock Face

  Things are not

  unmoving (or else what

  is inging for?). These things

  once-living

  drift toward the stone

  more movingly for any human glance

  that passes over them. The wind

  wells up to spill a trail

  of onces off the nevers,

  take opaqueness from an eye

  to mind, or near it.

  Every rocking

  takes some leaving

  to a stonish spirit.

  Who Needs It

  If language could be trusted to be true,

  the hardest would be loudest,

  softest, soft. But think again: the joke’s

  on you. Against a granite face the sea

  has knocked for years without

  much fuss or brouhaha—

  just here and there a little

  cracking sound, a suck

  in a pocket of cranny.

  But give it a load of beach-flesh—and

  you’ll never hear the end of it: the pumps in full

  palaver with the valvers, every grain

  resounding, every pound. You’d think

  slap-happy waves might hush, at such

  soft-sanded touches. On the contrary there is

  a cardiac clamor, a sumptuousness,

  roaring into space. The ocean’s noisiest

  around the giving place.

  O stranded earth, O beach of

  fellow men, I see you selve and cleave in every

  single way you can. And all the ways add up:

  each needleworker’s couch and bounded town,

  each humming humanific lobe has thrown

  its tune into the planetary wave. But what’s

  the message of our massing,

  past these minuscules of parts? Is it a song of manyness,

  or tininess? This suburb-reverb spilling out,

  gregarious, egregious, from the globe—

  does it go on for light-years, and convulse

  the quietudes of heaven? Wake

  some star-shells? Stir some dulse?

  My guess is yes, since endlessness

  needs us to take its pulse.

  Mourner’s Kaddish

  Let’s make it

  bigger and more awesome,

  god’s big name in the world,

  the world he made as only

  lonely gods would do. (And may he make

  a better one, by god, before he’s through.)

  May his big name go out beyond

  all space and time, the way a heart goes out.

  Be “hallowed and honored, extolled and exalted,

  adored and acclaimed”—to use the big old words

  (though human hymns can’t fathom him, nor get

  an inkling of his eye). May he make peace

  despite our spite, and may our heavy spirits fly.

  May he who writes the music soon arrange

  to make the meaning clear—if not today

  then (let us pray)

  before the last musicians die.

  The Microscope

  Through petri dishes’ rings

  life is transmogrified. When we

  look into things, we see

  there’s space inside.

  Medium as Meteorologist

  Listening in or looking out,

  alert to othernesses, grasping something

  now and t
hen, a hand or pattern,

  circle, sympathy, or symbol (one side trembles

  when the other one grows hot)—not

  knowing one is feeling, past

  five-minded touch, one wants to feel

  secure. What comes is no more than

  an airwave, lick of love, or lack

  of candlepower. Focus on the glimmer

  as the blown rain batters us broadside

  from the haunts of nature, just beyond

  the blinds. Our knowing is a feel

  for the nuance: our sentience itself

  the whole séance.

  An Underworldliness

  for Aileen Winter Mostel

  Maybe a maker makes

  another out—by the mark

  of the mechanism—keyboard cabaret—

  clown in love with his own club (one foot’s

  spondee). I turned it over

  in my sleeping head, that

  fallow feeling—pillow a numbset’s

  handskull—till from fidgeting synapses

  rose an REM of ultivated answer—

  all-but-seeing

  eye on a stem—the glancer born to blow

  by way of aneurysm... (at what

  altitude or depth, what

  certitude or asterisk,

  nobody seeing

  could see through).

  The star was visibly

  newfangled, brimming over from

  the wave or cup one was

  to drain or fill—who knew? No

  thinking would contain it now.

  Sidewise it angled, and shone up.

  About the Author

  Heather McHugh is the author of thirteen books of poetry, translation, and literary essays, including a Griffin International Poetry Prize translation, as well as Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist volumes. McHugh has taught literature and writing for over three decades, most regularly at the University of Washington in Seattle and in the low-residency M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. From 1999 to 2005 she served as a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, and in 2000 she was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

  Acknowledgments

  The American Scholar: “And the Greatest of These,” “Boondocks,” “Man in the Street” (under the title “Hand over Mouth”), “No Sex for Priests,” “Unto High Heaven,” “Which Is Given for You” (under the title “A Smattering”)

  The Best American Poetry 2006 (eds. Paul Muldoon and David Lehman): “Ill-Made Almighty”

  Boston Review: “An Underworldliness”

  Botanica (a poem portfolio designed by Enid Mark): “The River Overflows the Rift”

  Electronic Poetry Review: “Thous by the Thousands”

  Fence: “For Want of Better Words”

  Ink Node: “On Purpose Laid,” “Study Under Fire”

  The New Yorker: “Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies”

  Poetry: “Dark View,” “Half Border and Half Lab,” “Myrrha to the Source,” “Not to Be Dwelled On,” “Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork,” “Space Bar”

  Poetry London: “Both Sides Snipe at the Holy Ghost,” “Nocebo” Poetry Northwest: “Glass House,” “Mary’s Reminder”

  TriQuarterly: “Far Niente,” reprinted in Writing Poems, 7th ed. (ed. Michelle Boisseau)

  The Washington Post: “Half Border and Half Lab,” “Not to Be Dwelled On”

  World Poetry: “A Blind” (under the title “A Blind of Green”)

  A tip of the hat to United States Artists, and to the Creative Writing Program at the University of Washington: they afforded me time in which to write the poems in this book. Merrie-Ellen Wilcox, editor and friend, patiently fielded a flurry of eleventh-hour misgivings. Many of these pieces were written in honor of friends I loved who died during these past few years, leaving rips in the fabric of the world. I wish to acknowledge them here, and bless their having been: Elliot Fishbein, Patty Swanson, Karen Shabetai, and Karen Tepfer.

  Copyright 2009 by Heather McHugh

  All rights reserved

  Cover art: ©iStockphoto.com / Joan Kimball

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