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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