Heather McHugh

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 shitpump keeps it so. II. Out of the mouth comes a tongue, it calls itself linguistic and it never quite effects the cover-up (good Lord, there's much to cover up: so many belches, outcries, upchucks, sneezes, puffings, hiccups, osculations, hawks and coughs)— so laughter (which, among the noises, prides itself on being the most intellectual) can't help but come out, snorting. Nothing smiled or mild or meanwhiling—a laugh's got teeth to send it off, and spit to keep it company, and rot to end up with. Its closest kin is grimace, it's a grimacing with wind. It will (the will be damned) burst out in bad cacaphonies of brouhaha and borborygma—it's the stockbroker of mockeries, a trachea rake— the vent of rage and irony, and right there in the very shrine of signs. A laugh, I mean, is sorrow's archery and signature, while flesh is being hoisted and arrayed on roosts of skeleton. III. I saw what good comes to; I saw the figure human being cuts, upon its frame. The laugh was a cry from my own perscrewed, misnailed, cross-crafted armature. Despite your consternations, oh you meekened warners and polite conventioneers, the thieves were better served upon that day. For the heart is a muscle, where cruelty's humored. The tooth of moral rectitude's a fang. What I gave at the sight of him there was up. What I got of humanity there was the hang . . .

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 a 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 the 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.

Lined up behind the space bartender is the meaning of it all, the vessels marked with letters, numbers, signs. Beyond the flats the monitor looms, for all the world like the world. Images and motions, weeping women, men in hats. I have killed many happy hours here, with my bare hands, where TV passes for IV, among the space cadets and dingbats.

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. Two if by subject we mean topic. One if by death we wind up meaning love. And none if a subject must entail the curlicue’s indulgence of itself.)

Stuck on the fridge, our favorite pin-up girl is anorexic. On the radio we have a riff of Muzak sax, and on the mind a self-help book. We sprawl all evening, all alone, in the unraised ranch; all day the company we kept kept on incorporating. As for the world of poverty, we did our best, thanks to a fund of Christian feeling and mementos from Amelia, the foster child, who has the rags and seven photogenic sisters we prefer in someone to be saved. She's proof Americans have got a heart to go with all that happy acumen you read about. We're known to love a million little prettinesses, decency, and ribbons on the cockapoo. (But who will study alphabets for hands? Who gives a damn what patience goes into a good wheelchair? Who lugs the rice from its umpteen stores to the ends of the earth, to even one dead-end? Not we.) Our constitutional pursuit is happiness, i.e. somebody nice, and not too fat, we can have for our personal friend.

Self-interest cropped up even there, the day I hoisted three instead of the two called-for spades of loam onto 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, I'd give an arm or leg to get that spoonful back. She cannot die again; and I do nothing but relive.

In sympathy with Gaspara Stampa By woman so touched, so pressed, detachment being thought achievable at all is boggling in itself. Its being thought achievable by love—but love for only all (not someone’s single) sentience— appears the precept of too cold a form of flame. How much of a hand in things relinquishes the hold of things-at-hand? What kiss might such a mind reclaim? A swirl of dust in Buddhist schools, perhaps. A view of several solar systems from above. Not love. The thought appeals as it appals: Slow learners, we must spurn the selving sensualities, to feel for feelers of this kind, unfasten passion’s burner to identify what’s under it— in short, must court dispassion just to be compassionate.

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 whirling there upon the interstate. That rough 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.

O fluent one, o muscle full of hydrogen, o stuff of grief, whom the Greeks accuse of spoiling souls, whose destiny is downward, whose reflecting's up—I think I must have come from you. Just one more cup.

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.