View Full Version : Heather McHugh
quasimodo1
04-15-2008, 03:25 PM
Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun
by Heather McHugh
A book is a suicide postponed.
--Cioran
Too volatile, am I? too voluble? too much a word-person?
I blame the soup: I'm a primordially
stirred person.
Two pronouns and a vehicle was Icarus with wings.
The apparatus of his selves made an ab-
surd person.
The sound I make is sympathy's: sad dogs are tied afar.
But howling I become an ever more un-
heard person.
I need a hundred more of you to make a likelihood.
The mirror's not convincing-- that at-best in-
ferred person.
As time's revealing gets revolting, I start looking out.
Look in and what you see is one unholy
blurred person. ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
04-15-2008, 03:29 PM
Heather McHugh was born in California in 1948 and raised in rural Virginia. She entered Harvard University at the age of 16, where she took a seminar with Robert Lowell and had her first poem published in The New Yorker. “My whole work is to catch the word by surprise, sneaking up on language, sneaking up on the world as it lurks in words,” McHugh said. “I love the recesses of reason. That’s a great place to set my mind at rest.”
Exuding a love of language, wit, and observation, McHugh creates poems that are profoundly intelligent. Through the use of puns, rhymes, and syntactical twists, her work is an ongoing inquiry into the ways language can aid and impede participation in life. “I write because I want to find out what was bothering me . . . I’m not sure what it is that wants to be said, but I’m there to be its scribe,” says McHugh. “Almost always I’ve seen some pattern. Then comes a rocking and a humming. I find language to document that play of patterns in the world.” -- http://www.lectures.org/mchugh.html
quasimodo1
04-18-2008, 11:54 PM
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 club
(one foot's spondee).
I turned it over
in my sleeping head—
that fallow feeling—
pillow a numbset's
handskull till
from the 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
from a wave or cup one was
to drain or fill—who knew?
{excerpt}
quasimodo1
04-19-2008, 02:13 AM
A Physics
When you get down to it, Earth
has our own great ranges
of feeling-Rocky, Smoky, Blue-
and a heart that can melt stones.
The still pools fill with sky,
as if aloof, and we have eyes
for all of this-and more, for Earth's
reminding moon. We too are ruled
by such attractions-spun and swaddled,
rocked and lent a light. We run
our clocks on wheels, our trains
on time. But all the while we want
to love each other endlessly-not only for
a hundred years, not only six feet up and down.
We want the suns and moons of silver
in ourselves, not only counted coins in a cup. ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
04-19-2008, 02:15 PM
The Fabric: A Poet's Vesalius
by Heather McHugh
Some etymologists give the Greek "to see for
oneself" as the source for the English word
"autopsy." An alternative, "seeing into oneself," is
hard to overlook when one studies the work of the
sixteenth-century Belgian anatomist Vesalius. I gaze
on these �corch� figures with an exquisitely
doubled (or divided) sense of looking.
Take the suffering skeleton (1), for instance. Very
detailed, down to the tailbone, an excruciated
figure: wailing away under the auspices of the
clinician. But the artist has been at work in this
presentation too. For the facts are mysteriously
informed by feeling, and as the brain can make us
feel, so too the heart can make us think.
1
Vesalius had his drawings done by Titian and his
studio. (Some scholars attribute the work to only
one artist, Calcar. For economy I'll refer to Titian
himself, since I hold him responsible for his atelier.)
There is some graphic footage here. The images
rivet and reveal us as no list of facts could do. And
the shocks are carnally compounded when (in the
muscleman series) flesh adds its suggestiveness to
gesture, yet overall, thanks to the depth of Titian's
gifts, the images cannot remain merely voyeuristic.
Only a lifetime after Gutenberg died, Vesalius
delivered to the printer for production and
reproduction his De humani corpore fabrica, the
extraordinary volume that contained these images
and many more. What wows us in them now must
once have wowed that printer too, the moment he
laid eyes upon such beautifully belabored (and
bedeviled) bodies, their lines and delineations
studied to a fault. So carnal an exactitude! Even
more than this work's forthrightness, its artifice
assails us: the skeletons' figures are figured—down
to the numbers of their fingertips, or, more
precisely, down to the letters of their digits. And so
they enter the realm where sign and design,
science and art, conspire.
Drawn as surely to the drawn-and-printed as to the
drawn-and-quartered figures (and as surely to the
syntactics of the situations as to the semantics) I
found I couldn't get enough of them. My senses
fell to feasting. What exactly is that skeleton wailing
over? As he mourns his lot, we see his lot is, not
least, that one bit of real estate he's stuck on. His
situation in time and space, unnatural though it is,
moves us by analogy, or sympathy: we know, in
time, we can't go back; he seems to know he can't
go on.
However disposed we may be, in the face of such a
foreground—in the face of such a face—to ignore
the circumstantial background, nevertheless it bears
regarding. (A casual eye is tempted away from
it—as from those bowers and beaches of Victorian
photographic studios, stylizations so conventional
they lose the power to refer to anything but
convention itself: their branches and waves
seeming merely those of a weary imagination. But
here the backdrop is no ordinary lover's lane. Our
human being, our human has-been, stands on a
bleak landscape, premises of hill and hole. He's
either just come from, or is just now going toward,
the very earth whose parts we tag for parts of our
own anatomies: at the foot of a hill, at the mouth of
a hole, this figure pauses to be figurative, and there
to mourn the unrecoverable).
Much is not to be recovered in the realm of the
suffering skeleton. Flesh, for example. Beckett says
"tears are liquefied brain," and catches the pain in a
language pan. This guy has cried his eyes out too. ...
-------------------------------------------------------To access the rest of this essay...link...
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/feature.html?id=180310
quasimodo1
04-21-2008, 08:38 PM
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=7085 Very interesting article about McHugh from an established literary publication.
quasimodo1
06-07-2008, 02:09 AM
From the Towers
by Heather McHugh
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 the earthling's sake) ignore
all prayers followed by against, or for. Teach us to bear
life's senselessness, our insignificance, and more;
let's call that sanity. The terrifying prospect isn't some
escapist with a novel, fond of comfort, munching sweets—
it is the busy hermeneut, so serious he's sour, intent on making
meaning of us all, and bursting from the towers to the streets.
quasimodo1
06-08-2008, 06:06 PM
Nano-Knowledge by Heather McHugh
There, a little right
of Ursus Major, is
the Milky Way:
a man can point it out,
the biggest billionfold of all
predicaments he's in:
his planet's street address.
What gives? What looks
a stripe a hundred million
miles away from here
is where we live.
*
Let's keep it clear. The Northern Lights
are not the North Star. Being but
a blur, they cannot reassure us.
They keep moving - I think far
too easily. September spills
some glimmers of
the boreals to come: {excerpt}
Chester
06-09-2008, 06:07 AM
Great stuff. Love it.
Geez, her Prosody is so dense. I can't figure out what she is doing to stress where she wants.
Chester
06-09-2008, 12:19 PM
Hmm...strange. I had no such problem. Well you know, JBI, it's poetry. Maybe you were reading it. You should try interpreting it instead.
quasimodo1
06-15-2008, 07:00 AM
A leading American poet reclaims the realm of criticism in distinctive and impassioned readings of poems and other works of art.
"When I call poetry a form of partiality," writes Heather McHugh, "I mean its economies operate by powers of intimation: glimmering and glints, rather than exhaustible sums. It is a broken language from the beginning, brimming with non-words: all that white welled up to keep the line from surrendering to the margin; all that quiet, to keep the musics marked." In Broken English, McHugh applies her poetic sensibility and formidable critical insight to topics ranging from the poetry of Valéry and Rilke to ancient Greek drama and Yoruba folk songs, offering intense, passionate, highly personal readings that are informed and unified by her concern for the relationships among language, culture, and poetry.
"A truly major book . . . I am tempted to say that with this book American poetry reclaims for itself true intellectual status, and McHugh does so with a marvellously selfless intensity that exemplifies much of what she says about the 'I.' This is love of poetry, and sharp criticism of her American peers, which represents itself at the highest levels of intellectual ambition without any egoistic posing. I know of no better writing on Dickinson, Rilke, and Celan." —Charles Altieri
"McHugh puts theory to generous use on behalf of poetry and of poets. This important, lovely book may well help to end the useless bickering and distrust that have lately impeded the articulation of American poets." —Donald Revell
{0-8195-6272-6} "Broken English" subtitle, "Poetry and Partiality" by Heather McHugh
quasimodo1
06-16-2008, 11:29 PM
The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary
I.
Smilers, smirkers, chucklers, grinners,
platitudinizers, euphemists: it wasn't you
I emulated there, in that
Godawful place. What kind
of face
to put on it? How simple
is a simon's sign? To my mind
laughter's not the mark of pleasure, not
a pleasantry that spread; instead
it's intimate with sheer
delirium: spilt brain
on split lip, uncontainable
interiority—
(make no mistake, it is a horror, this
inmated, intimated
self, revealed as your
material: red smear,
white swipe). It's said the brain
stinks first, then organworks of art and eatery,
and then—what's left? a little cartilage for
ambiguity? a little tendon's B&D? At last, the least
ephemeral of evidences: nuggetworks (discrete, and
indiscreet) of teeth, bone-bits, odd scraps
of a delapidated strut—and this is just
the sort of stuff, insensate,
to which life (which comes again
as slime) has always
loved adhering. Life! Who wouldn't
laugh? Your inner life! Your pet
pretense! It can't be kept up, can't
be kept clean,
even in a thought,
except a good
bloodworks or ****pump keeps it so.
{excerpt}
quasimodo1
06-23-2008, 05:22 PM
With Due Respect To Thor
The dog has shrunk between the brake and clutch.
His shaking shakes a two-ton truck. From a God
so furious, he cannot hide his hide. Outside,
in the world at large, black hours are being
pearled and shafted. A tree stands out
spectacularly branched; the mind's eye
grows alert. This thing can hurt.
It had us once, it's having volts
of big idea again— ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
06-27-2008, 09:31 PM
In a Bottle
Into the lake lap glittering with
Mercuries and paint-removers, one duck drives
Its fledge-wake down along its own
Diminishments of rush, to end stock-still at the arrowhead’s
Tip. The other never was symmetrical, or flew. Made out
Of waste, topped with a quicket of hedge, a hill appears
Where no hill ever was before. It grows and grows. It grows
Till tillers tire, it grows till the king’s dumb come
Done gone. (That lyre should be
Administered a serum! Every last lackluster mist,
Each lactose-lacking mother, can be fixed! No fear!) From human
City rooms a mush of doctorable suburb issues forth–degrees
In marrow-clog, amounts in mottlement. Kreme de la
Kreme! (Officially OK for all of us to be superlative, I’m pretty
Sure, as long as the kids take all their tele-tablets
And the wellness store takes spelling
From the FCC. It’s thanks to lawyers
We have settlements at all, of course,
And thanks to governors your class in governmentalese–it is
Required–and wired!–let’s give our nation’s CEO a great
Big hand! A chip for every memory loss and shoulder! ... {excerpt}
-----------------------------------------http://www.drunkenboat.com/db3/mchugh/bottle.html
quasimodo1
07-03-2008, 05:51 PM
Debtor’s Prison Road
I.
They let me go
at night, minus my timepiece, lighter,
personal effects. The air is always shaking
the same jars of safety pins: cicadas.
Song is my recidivism: always
I'm abandoning the road to stand
(unwatched, unseconded) in someone's
field. The stars (that are not mine)
tick fitfully, they always have
appointments. Punctual, six-sharp,
they are David's; they have lodged in his
death tent, have stuck in his mud sleep. Bad luck
leaves me a loan: no company, no katy-
did or promissory
note or night
can last.
The air
loses its nerve,
the old saw its eyeteeth and I
my words—my alwaysing and my. ... {excerpt, Part I of II}
quasimodo1
07-03-2008, 07:24 PM
Heather McHugh -- "Hard"--- Suppose you have
to have a mountain. Do you call up All-or-Nothing
Limited with blasters in battalions, and dispatch the
under- and the other-worldly straight to
smithereens? A moment blows what several
thousand years could ease-- time moves the
planet all the time without demolishing the
delicate-- no opposition between powers, no
antipathy of east to west. The networks go so far
and fine we can't conceive them-- intricacies of a
single rock or river, rate of rainbow-- look, I can't
get over it. Let all your big bulldozing eras snore
their fast Manhattans down; let lovers of the good
and quick erect their clever rocks (the graveyard has
its own downtown); ..... {excerpt from the poem,
"Hard" from the collection "Shades" first published
in 1988}
quasimodo1
07-03-2008, 11:21 PM
Heather McHugh -- Deposition of the Seer ------
I burned the arrows/ then I burned the air./ I
burned the boats/ the bay was taking/ for a mere
mirage. I took them for/ a fact. I saw a sway rise
up/ from gold to red, and red to black --/ I saw a
sway, I couldn't hold it./ Whose ring was that.
whose the wiry hand? And/ by the bye who added
good? To hell who added O? ..... {excerpt, from the collection "The Father of the Predicaments", 1999}
quasimodo1
07-04-2008, 10:06 PM
Heather McHugh -- Streaming Audio ------------
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more
difficult than it is for other people." Thomas Mann
The thought can hurt. It runs the mindbed,
underwrites the waves. It means to come as close
to real as possible. No real is possible. It means
to come too close. Its hosts are on alert. Its paths
aren't ideo -- but neither can you keep its time. It
lingers in a special sense, the kind that kind of kills.
It seems to some as possible as ever....{excerpt
from this poem, from the collection, The Father of
the Predicaments}
quasimodo1
07-05-2008, 10:17 PM
STROKE
The literate are ill-prepared for this
snap in the line of life:
the day turns a trick
of twisted tongues and is
untiable, the month by no mere root
moon-ridden, and the yearly eloquences yielding more
than summer's part of speech times four. We better learn
the buried meaning in the grave: here
all we see of its alphabet is tracks
of predators, all we know of its tense
the slow seconds and quick centuries
of sex. Unletter the past and then
the future comes to terms. One late fall day
I stumbled from the study and I found
the easy symbols of the living room revised:
my shocked senses flocked to the window's reference ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
07-17-2008, 02:17 AM
NOT UNTERRIFIED Edge-rich, the beach is a batcher of changes: five long bands of upwash stretch a cove into an afternoon, and deepen it to evening there, where ten sandpipers race along the liquefaction's froth. It beats, at their needling, a quick retreat; wherefrom they turn three feet uphill to find the last tide's hemline, run its whole cove-length of lacework back-- then tack and race and tack and race again-- the long and short of it is life for them, who poke through frillwork at such breakneck speed, make tracks like some unholy Underwood -- till each new tide-line's trove of trash has been sandpipered, dashed along. The water now is deadest low. What that means, really, we can't know by points of moment, or a pin, or by the punctuator's time: we need the binding stitcheries of syntax. {excerpt}
quasimodo1
07-23-2008, 07:08 AM
Constructive
You take a rock, your hand is hard.
You raise your eyes, and there's a pair
of small beloveds, caught in pails.
The monocle and eyepatch correspond.
You take a glove, your hand is soft.
The ocean floor was done
in lizardskin. Around a log or snag
the surface currents run
like lumber about a knot. A boat
is bent to sea—we favor the medium
we're in, our shape's
around us. It takes time. ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
07-25-2008, 12:20 AM
MOVING MIDWEST TO TEACH
A tornado is an education.
It points things out,
wipes things out.
It speaks without hearing.
It is respected
in the circles in which it moves.
It divides form from content
and takes away lives.
Those who survive it
do so in graves. Who do not
are buried in the gravy
air, lying even
high in the imagination and giving
up meat. ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
07-25-2008, 08:41 PM
Pay Per View
Don’t knock my dish.
I hold it dear, unincidental
at the household’s entryway: there is
intelligence in its half-
cocked concavity. No fixity of
whereabouts: and no direction but the shifting one
from whose beyond the next
known jolt could come.
Not homeless, just never at home,
just always out to lunch, just always in the head.
{excerpt}
quasimodo1
08-17-2008, 03:31 PM
ONE MOON IN BINOCULARS
How could this homely instrument
Have power to pull
The whole moon closer,
Hold ten textures in
The intimacy of a glance?
The silvers tremble severally
Splashed and sanded,
Spine-wise, spidery,
In sharp and shadowed
Pocks upon the plain. The view
Is black and white, but brighter than TV,
Clearer than sand in a glass of vodka,
Shivering, witheach
Detail distilled
Down to the pebbles
Of ocular grain. To cast an eye
Across its wild serenities
Is to be glad ... {excerpt}
{from the collection SHADES}
quasimodo1
08-24-2008, 07:27 PM
SPILLED
The waiter dropped a tray of glassware and
The din of conversation stopped as if
In shock at competition. Not until
That moment were we quite aware
Of what a roar the ordinary made,
Not until a knife of other noise could cut
Right through it to the greater emptiness,
Right through it zero, there
Where no one for a moment said
A blessed word. And then the other
Nothings started coming back, the hum of small talk
Rising gradually to flow and to recirculate, its rhythms
Swelling up and out of the hole in the story to make
The story normal once again, the cruise control back on,
The life as a career in which we can afford,
As usual, to fail to hear.
The restaurant's show of selves
Collected into dreamy twos and fours;
Their fantasies are fed, their livings made;
The hundred couples can pretend
They are accustomed to a cook and maid
And then, by some consensual agreement (because none
Can really be the monarch of the model) they ignore
The commonplace, with its proximities, the many
Foreign monarchies that munch and belch
Next door. Each buys a little
Privacy, say three by five, and dreams that he
Is different. .....
{excerpt, from the collection "SHADES" }
quasimodo1
08-30-2008, 02:01 PM
From Poems New and Collected
THE CENTURY'S DECLINE
Our twentieth century was going to improve on the others.
It will never prove it now,
Now that its years are numbered,
Its gait is shaky,
Its breath is short.
Too many things have happened
That weren't supposed to happen,
And what was supposed to come about
Has not.
Happiness and spring, among other things,
Were supposed to be getting closer.
Fear was expected to leave the mountains and the valleys.
Truth was supposed to hit hoe
Before a lie.
A couple of problems weren't going
To come up anymore:
Hunger, for example,
And war, and so forth.
There was going to be respect
For helpless people's helplessness,
Trust, that kind of stuff.
Anyone who planned to enjoy the world
Is now faced
With a hopeless task.
Stupidity isn't funny.
Wisdom isn't gay.
Hope
Isn't that young girl anymore,
Et cetera, alas.
God was finally going to believe
In a man both good and strong,
But good and strong
Are still two different men. ...
{excerpt, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak)
quasimodo1
09-10-2008, 07:48 PM
From The Father of the Predicaments
SO THICK?
(Freud, presented with a copy of Wilhelm Reich's book
The Function of the Orgasm, is said to have remarked "So Thick?)
As thieves, as clotted cream, molasses poured in March
Or dullards duly quizzed, as thin's mate in
The marriage vow, or black fly hoverings
Upon Katahdin, ketchup in the kitchen's
Bottleneck, or traffic's slow red ooze
On I-5 every dusk, as musk
In the mind of an elephant,
Or malice in the minds of men,
This treatise on the uses
Of the human love-cramp
Isn't surely anywhere as thick.
But what's the use of use, at this
Imponderable juncture? Just
How practical are practices? Is poetry
Poetic? And to what high end
The spondee's spasm? If the seizure leaves us
Sobered up, we're lucky. Lucky
(after the humpback's beached) to have a bath
Of modest aftermath, a tristesse to
Redress the tryst! We're lucky to escape
The clutch of Sophocles' "furious master" (feeling's fist),
For the rest of the evening. A breather from breathing!
If the world for a merciful while be spared our craving,
Or if spilling brine by brimfuls can
(for only the blink of an animal eye)
Undo a few of our meaning's demeanings,
Our siring's desirings, and give us one
Pure moment's peace, ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
09-14-2008, 07:20 PM
From The Father of the Predicaments
CARTOGRAPHER AT HOME
I. Gin Cove Road, 1997
Golds beyond degree have sunk
To new September lows, sent stripes across
A hundred trunks, for one
Hour only, codes to deepest moss.
In open fields, deciduousness does
Brisk businesses in crosshatch. Were you to be drawn
Past forest to the shore, your fur about your ears, you'd read
Long volumes in the cliff's descent: through nine horizons
(age of pebble, age of shale)
A lean subversive root has struck
Its lyric, corkscrewed vertical. The beach
Is one big wedge. It makes
Its hard point underwater, but it keeps
Its uplands fluted (evidence of decades spent
Failing at a dune). Upon this higher composition,
Skeins of black egg-sac and olive tatter
Twist their best successions of remark. The beach
Has lured into its sandhold something
Hacked-off, root-like, ten feet wide,
And tipped it over, and begun to swallow it:
Half of the muscular tangle protrudes
Above the fluent strand. Such countlessness
Is script: unfathomable, yet exact. Impressed
Into a mere episteme, the few
Become a future, and the littoral
A literature. In suffix, much is made
Of what-- at root -- was born (like Nat and Mort,
And landlords of the mind). I haven't so much
Grounds for thought, as thought for grounds:
The knuckles, needles, ledges of
A calligraphic bent. O
Better me, my letters! (Let
The link be rent.)
{one of three parts)
quasimodo1
09-24-2008, 10:05 PM
From Shades
20-200 ON 747
There is rain on the glass but it all disappears
When I look toward the curve on the world.
(The here and now is clear, I mean, so we
Can't see it.) In an airplane, chance
Encounters always ask, So what
Are your poems about? They're about
Their business, and their father's business and their
Monkey's uncle, they're about
How nothing is about, they're not
About about. This answer drives them
Back to the snack tray every time.
Phil Fenstermacher, for example, turns up
Perfectly clear in my memory, perfectly attentive to
His Vache Qui Rit, that saddest cheese. And not an interlude
While we
Commiserate: it takes what might
Be years to open life's array
Of incidental parcels--mysteries
Of red strips, tips, and strings, the tricks
Of tampons, lips of band-aids, perforated notches on
Detergent boxes, spatial reasoning milk-carton quiz and subtle
Teleologies of toilet paper.
Mister Fenstermacher is relieved
To fill his mind with the immediate
And masterable challenge of the cheese
After his brief and chastening foray
Into the social arts. We part
Before we part; indeed
We part before we meet. I sense
The French philosophers nearby,
I hope not in the cockpit (undermining
Meaning, as they do, or testing aerial stranslation's
Three degrees). They think
We're sunk, we're sunk, in our little
Container, our story
Of starting and stopping. Just
Whose story is this anyway? Out of my mind
Whose words emerge? Is there a self the self
Surpasses? (Look at your glasses, someone
Whispers. Maybe the world
Is speckled by
Your carelessness and not its nature. ... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
10-24-2008, 04:47 PM
Philosopher Orders Crispy Pork
by Heather McHugh
I love him so, this creature I do pray
was treated kindly. I will pay
as much as 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. ... {excerpt - from Oct. Poetry magazine}
quasimodo1
04-18-2009, 05:59 PM
from Shades
WITH YOU GONE
(For Wydette, with love)
We see signs everywhere-- the stars
and stones are moving, every
animal is you. Don't
slap that fly, says Connie, and we all
laugh outright, after all week weeping.
You are there, in the hilarity itself,
in us (Steve has your face
and walk, and Scott your kind
of kindnesses and doubt, and Mary moral
eloquence, and Charles your sense
of solitude and the sensational,
and Connie's funny and your parents share
their home with me, someone they barely know.
I read your scrawl, I write the record, cannot speak
enough for you). It's we
who are the missing ones, the way
a person in a mirror stares
Forever, without being there. Who are we like?
What do we know? The race is
20 miles per second, every day around
a nuclear event or local politics or fashionable interior
and then
one's brother cannot breathe. Millennia
are dust. We cannot locate you; we're lost. .... {excerpt}
quasimodo1
06-27-2010, 08:32 PM
http://i840.photobucket.com/albums/zz321/quasimodo1/HeatherMcHugh.jpg Debtor’s Prison Road
I.
They let me go
at night, minus my timepiece, lighter,
personal effects. The air is always shaking
the same jars of safety pins: cicadas.
Song is my recidivism: always
I'm abandoning the road to stand
(unwatched, unseconded) in someone's
field. The stars (that are not mine)
tick fitfully, they always have
appointments. Punctual, six-sharp,
they are David's; they have lodged in his
death tent, have stuck in his mud sleep. Bad luck
leaves me a loan: no company, no katy-
did or promissory
note or night
can last.
The air
loses its nerve,
the old saw its eyeteeth and I
my words—my alwaysing and my.
{excerpt, part I of II}
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