Heather McHugh Poems

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Etymological Dirge

 'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear.

Calm comes from burning.
Tall comes from fast.
Comely doesn't come from come.
Person comes from mask.

The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.
Incentive has its source in song
and winning in the sufferer.

Afford yourself what you can carry out.
A coward and a coda share a word.
We get our ugliness from fear.
We get...Read more of this...

Ghazal of the Better-Unbegun

 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...Read more of this...

Ghoti

 The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete

with fish. Our wish was for a better
revelation: for a correspondence--
if not lexical, at least
phonetic; if not with Madonna

then at least with Mary Magdalene.
Instead we get the sheer
opacity of things: an accident
of incident, a tracery of history: the dung

inside the dungarees, the...Read more of this...

Nano-Knowledge

 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...Read more of this...

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...Read more of this...

The Father of the Predicaments

 He came at night to each of us asleep
And trained us in the virtues we most lacked.
Me he admonished to return his stare
Correctly, without fear.Unless I could,
Unblinking, more and more incline
Toward a deep unblinkingness of his,
He would not let me rest.Outside
In the dark of the world, at the foot
Of the library steps, there lurked
A Mercury of rust, its cab...Read more of this...

What He Thought

 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. The Italian literati seemed
bewildered by the language of America: they asked us
what does "flat drink" mean? and the mysterious
"cheap date" (no explanation lessened
this one's mystery). Among Italian writers...Read more of this...

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—about
thirteen a minute. Do...Read more of this...