Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968–1993

By Heather McHugh

A renowned poet's artful collection is a striking body of work.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 9, 1994
• ISBN: 9780819572127

Book preview

New Poems

1987–1993

What He Thought

for Fabbio Doplicher

We were supposed to do a job in Italy

and, full of our feeling for

ourselves (our sense of being

Poets from America) we went

from Rome to Fano, met

the mayor, mulled

a couple matters over (what’s

cheap date, they asked us; what’s

flat drink). Among Italian literati

we could recognize our counterparts:

the academic, the apologist,

the arrogant, the amorous,

the brazen and the glib—and there was one

administrator (the conservative), in suit

of regulation gray, who like a good tour guide

with measured pace and uninflected tone narrated

sights and histories the hired van hauled us past.

Of all, he was most politic and least poetic,

so it seemed. Our last few days in Rome

(when all but three of the New World Bards had flown)

I found a book of poems this

unprepossessing one had written: it was there

in the pensione room (a room he’d recommended)

where it must have been abandoned by

the German visitor (was there a bus of them?)

to whom he had inscribed and dated it a month before.

I couldn’t read Italian, either, so I put the book

back into the wardrobe’s dark. We last Americans

were due to leave tomorrow. For our parting evening then

our host chose something in a family restaurant, and there

we sat and chatted, sat and chewed,

till, sensible it was our last

big chance to be poetic, make

our mark, one of us asked

                                        "What’s poetry?

Is it the fruits and vegetables and

marketplace of Campo dei Fiori, or

the statue there?" Because I was

the glib one, I identified the answer

instantly, I didn’t have to think—"The truth

is both, it’s both," I blurted out. But that

was easy. That was easiest to say. What followed

taught me something about difficulty,

for our underestimated host spoke out,

all of a sudden, with a rising passion, and he said:

The statue represents Giordano Bruno,

brought to be burned in the public square

because of his offense against

authority, which is to say

the Church. His crime was his belief

the universe does not revolve around

the human being: God is no

fixed point or central government, but rather is

poured in waves through all things. All things

move. "If God is not the soul itself, He is

the soul of the soul of the world." Such was

his heresy. The day they brought him

forth to die, they feared he might

incite the crowd (the man was famous

for his eloquence). And so his captors

placed upon his face

an iron mask, in which

he could not speak. That’s

how they burned him. That is how

he died: without a word, in front

of everyone.

               And poetry—

                                    (we’d all

put down our forks by now, to listen to

the man in gray; he went on

softly)—

                         poetry is what

he thought, but did not say.

Acts of God

I. Tornado

I said the people come inside.

They would be safe

in the building.

So many of those people die.

You can see my guilt.

I could see hands

to a lady moving.

I knew the lady.

You can see my guilt.

Sometimes I want to run, to get

away from it. I ask forgiveness

night and day, I ask it from

the cemetery. I can never

dream this storm away.

It was over for maybe minutes

then it was never over.

II. Lightning

It pushed me backward, I could see

my friends go backward, too,

as from a blast, but slowly,

very slowly, everything was in

a different time.

It burned inside my body.

I could feel my hands

curl up. My pocket got

on fire, I didn’t want

to reach in there and take

a handful of the hot.

My money hurt.

I’m different now forever, put that fact

into your book. My hair used to be straight.

My eyes—you see? They’re gray as ash.

They used to be light blue. You live,

if you’re lucky, but take my word—

it changes how you look.

Window: Thing as Participle

Welling and flowing and fastening, too,

the window itself became the fever,

faces waved and surfed

across its surface . . .

Stop that, she rebuked herself,

people are only passing on the sidewalk,

people are simply walking on the sidepass, yes,

that’s all you’re seeing, so much

water in an eye. But then the sneezes rose

from somewhere to attack

whole buildings, schools and churches,

massive stoneworks, city hall—

whatever stood, stood to be wracked—

did no one notice? They were all

at risk: whatever the window held

could tremble. Mortified, she sat

in the eye of the storm, with steam

from cups of cure to drape

or dramatize her time away; but still

the window went on streaming

all these bundled half-lives by, in one

continuous unravelling of differences, of

higher, lower, lighter, darker,

faces framed in fur or bared of head,

blown blond or blasted black, each one appointed

in a halo’s freeze-burn or an aura’s sun-chill,

each one with its hunch of forehead, over

only two hot coals per person . . .

Humankind was understandable in this

unending sentence of an EEG she witnessed

scrolling by; it was, at each new moment, modelled

into spikes of single-mindedness; but every

bobbing of discreteness in the flow, each

block or chunk, each head, she knew

(she knew) had its

own helixing and coils

of orienting endlessness, its moving

windows of reflective flux,

and its own someone

in a fix: that figure

underlying everything, that glimpse

in brown or blue, with fringe of lash:

a holy icon, prize of self, an image

irrecoverably, shimmeringly

still, it is so deeply

plunged into the nominative . . .

Curve

Freezeburn forms whirlpools and bearfur has curve.

My line is gravity’s

sheer vertical.

Memory’s the same

seme. Sail a memo

down: there’s the spooled

real: plunge into simulcast.

Caught up in the network is

a blue planet, spinner par

excellence.

It’s too small.

Throw it back.

Dry Time

Killed, the sand

didn’t give. All waves

went dead: your border

crossed itself.

I couldn’t tell or tear

us apart. In the absence

of hourglasses

meanwhiles

piled up, swells of the

dispellable. Even the diamond

shed no oil, not a drop

to delight the drilltip.

common.jpg

Partners having come

unwelded (blasted by nuclear

family life) we went

a long

way back,

as far as Abacus (empire of

the rook and stork). We roused

some dowsers

from a timeless doze, we had them

scatter Onan’s

nanoseconds

everywhere: in waves and particles, the clearest

solitudes could be

broadcast. At last

you kissed me, I

could die again, and one

good lick

of quicksand

took . . .

Seal

Born flipper-first into an icy wind

it gropes to locate anything hospitable, and that

turns out to be a nipple, cuffed in