Heather McHugh

Things are not unmoving (or else what is ing there for?) The things once-living fall on the never-living all the more movingly for the eye that passes over them. The wind wells up to spill a trail of onces off the nevers, take opaque from eye to mind, or near it — every rocking takes some leaving to a stonish spirit.

When Americans say a man takes liberties, they mean he’s gone too far. In Philadelphia today I saw a kid on a leash look mom-ward and announce his fondest wish: one bicentennial burger, hold the relish. Hold is forget, in American. On the courts of Philadelphia the rich prepare to serve, to fault. The language is a game as well, in which love can mean nothing, doubletalk mean lie. I’m saying doubletalk with me. I’m saying go so far the customs are untold. Make nothing without words, and let me be the one you never hold.

In the field is a house of wood. A window of the house contains the field. You can't see far with a sun in the sky, with a living-room lamp at night. Locality is all you light, and you, as single as a bed. But there's no end to dark. The bed is in the clearing and the clearing's in the wind; the world is a world among others. Now your cell-stars split.

A brilliance takes up residence in flaws— a brilliance all the unchipped faces of design refuse. The wine collects its starlets at a lip's fault, sunlight where the nicked glass angles, and affection where the eye is least correctable, where arrows of unquivered light are lodged, where someone else's eyes have come to be concerned. For beauty's sake, assault and drive and burn the devil from the simply perfect sun. Demand a birthmark on the skin of love, a tremble in the touch, in come a cry, and let the silverware of nights be flecked, the moon pocked to distribute more or less indwelling alloys of its dim and shine by nip and tuck, by chance's dance of laws. The brightness drawn and quartered on a sheet, the moment cracked upon a bed, will last as if you soldered them with moon and flux. And break the bottle of the eye to see what lights are spun of accident and glass.

Customs and chemistry made a name for themselves and it was Spot. He's gone to some utopos now, the dirty dog, doctor of crotches, digger of holes. Your airy clarities be damned, he loved our must and our mistakes — why hit him, then, who did us good? He's dead, he ought to be at home. He's damned put out, and so am I. *       *       * When blue is carried out, the law is red. When noon is said and done, it's dusk again. The greed for table makes the greed for bed. So cave canem, even stars have litters — little lookers, cacklers, killers . . . Morning raises up the hackled men. (What's milk, among our ilk, but opportunity for spillers?) *       *       * He saved our sorry highfalutin souls — the heavens haven't saved a fly. Orion's canniness who can condone? — that starring story, strapping blade! — and Sirius is  just a Fido joke — no laughter shakes the firmament. But O the family dog, the Buddha-dog — son of a bitch! he had a funny bone —

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.

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. II. In hush the repossessors reach the edges of the field. They pass for shadows, sheep of ambush, animals of permanence. They turn a black beyond returning and they haunt the sleepless. I don't count, who cannot earn my keep.

The sun that puts its spokes in every Wheel of manhandle and tree Derives its path of seashines (Sheer centrifugality) from my Regards. I send it My regards. Some yards Of lumen from the fabrika Have come unbolted from the look Of it (or likes of me), a long Unweaving or recarding I Cannot recall begun, and there Before my eyes a palm Puts lashes round the sun.

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. At night, the bed alive, what teller of truth could tell the two apart? Lover, beloved, hope is command. Your hand is given, when you take a hand.

I. Daily, the kindergarteners passed my porch. I loved their likeness and variety, their selves in line like little monosyllables, but huggable— I wasn't meant to grab them, ever, up into actual besmooches or down into grubbiest tumbles, my lot was not to have them, in the flesh. Was it better or worse to let their lovability go by untouched, and just watch over their river of ever- inbraiding relations? I wouldn't mother them or teach. We couldn't be each other's others; maybe, at removes, each other's each. II. Each toddler had a hand-hold on a loop of rope, designed to haul the whole school onward in the sidewalk stream— like pickerel through freshets, at the pull of something else's will, the children spun and bobbled, three years old and four (or were they little drunken Buddhas, buoyant, plump?). They looked now to the right, now to the sky, and now toward nothing (nothing was too small)— they followed a thread of destination, chain of command, order of actual rope that led to what? Who knew? For here and now in one child's eye there was a yellow truck, and in another's was a burning star; but from my own perspective, overhead, adult, where trucks and suns had lost their luster, they were one whole baby-rush toward a target, toward the law of targets, fledge in the wake of an arrowhead; a bull's-eye bloomed, a red eight-sided sign. What did I wish them? Nothing I foresaw.