Heather McHugh - Hinge & sign: poems, 1968-1993

Cover

Page i

Page ii

Page iii

Hinge & Sign

Poems, 19681993

Heather McHugh

Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England
Hanover and London

Page iv

Wesleyan University Press
Published by University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755
1994 by Heather McHugh
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America 5 4 3
CIP data appear at the end of the book

Acknowledgments appear on page 217

Page v

For Niko

Page vii

Preface

xiii

after Rilke

xvii

New Poems (19871993)

1

What He Thought

Acts of God

I. Tornado

II. Lightning

Window: Thing as Participle

Curve

Dry Time

Seal

Two-Legged

Fast

Coming

Glimpse of Main Event

My Shepherd

Untitled

The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary

Eastport

Well

Unguent

Some Kind of Pine

Numberless

To Go

Connubial

Prothalamion

The Size of Spokane

Auto

Better or Worse

Two St. Petersburgs

White Mind and Roses

Scenes from a Death

Page viii

32 Adults (1990)

51

Uncollected Poems (19751986)

63

Postcard from Provincetown

Circus

Sebastian's Mirror

A

Just Man

Live

Five Threes (Fast Bike)

Two Holidays

A Night in a World

For a Sad God

The Song Calls the Star Little

Faith

Kind of Poor

For a Good Man

Lifelike

Disappearee's Song

The Act

Where

Household

To a Christian

A Hurricane Can Cast

Denomination

Literal

Poems from Dangers (19681977)

91

Spectacles

Orbit

Pupil

Preferences

In Praise of Pain

The Score

Ozone

To See the Light

A Few Licks

Tendencies

Gig at Big Al's

Page ix

The Most

Outcry

Fable

Patronage

Double Agent

Politics

Fix

Excerpt from an Argument with Enthusiasts, Concerning Inspiration

Reservation

Against a Dark Field

Debtors' Prison Road

It is 70 degrees in late November. Opening a window, you nearly know

Stroke

Solitary's Solace in the Natural Sciences

Poems from A World of Difference (19771981)

121

The Field

The House

Like

The Fall

At a Loss

Mind

Meantime

Blue Streak

Meaning Business

Confessionist

Impressionist

Whoosh

Stall

Hag

High Jinx

North Island Songs

Language Lesson 1976

Toward an Understanding

Inside

Form

Syllables

The Nymph to Narcissus

Page x

When the Future is Black

Message at Sunset for Bishop Berkeley

Breath

Poems from To the Quick (19811987)

Four Poems after Rilke

The Amenities

In a World of Taking, the Mistake

Two Loves

The Trouble with ''In"

Spot in Space and Time

I Knew I'd Sing

Constructive

To God or Man

Bear in English

Animal Song

Take Care

What Could Hold Us

Point of Origin

To the Quick

Bar and Grill

A Physics

Big Ideas Among Earthlings

Or Else

The Ghost

What Poems Are For

The Matter Over

Poems from Shades (19811988)

181

Mox Nox

20200 on 747

What Hell Is

Unspeakable

Inflation

The Lyricist's Lament

The Oven Loves the TV Set

Who Made Her

Earthmoving Malediction

Hole Filler

ID

To Have To

Page xi

Not a Sin

Spilled

Hard

Melted Money

Stairwell

Labor

The Typewriter's the Kind

Place Where Things Got

Round Time

Shades

Thought of Night

From 20,000 Feet

Acknowledgments

217

Page xiii

Soy un fue, y un sera, y un es cansado.
[I am a was, and a will be, and a tried is.]
Francisco de Quevedo (15801645)

This offering of new poems, together with selections from my past books, comprising some twenty-five years in all, was not so much a labor of love (only the newest-hatched work still bears in relation to its creator sufficient strangeness to be lovable) as it was a work of wariness. For one thing, despite the reassurances of friends and editors, I was subject to the persistent suspicion that all lecteds (se- no less than col-) are more or less directly prepost-humous. For another, I was subject to the subject, and I didn't always like her.

The -lecteds remind us, etymologically, not of their status as writings but rather of their status as readings; and, certainly, to have gone back over decades of the writing of someone I no longer am is to have been engaged in a strange kind of reading: one in which I am doubly implicated. (SomebodyChesterton?said that autocriticism does honor to the writer, dishonor to the critic.) Even given the greatest scrupulousness as to self-regard, there are persistent parallaxes, skews of space and time.

But writing, like reading, implies in any case a very peculiar form of presence. It is presence at another moment. In this anachronism, this unsettled time, the intimacy between writer and reader (unlike other intimacies) seems the closer for its definition in deferral. Taking up any book to read it, how am I with the writer? This with is without the usual conversational confronting; for I identify myself as (I don't identify myself over against) the unfolding. I am with the writer not en face, as an opposite respondent, but tte, as a kind of mind-reader.

And as a writer, how am I with the reader? This is an engagement with a very non-particular someone, an other very like a self, unseeable, a grounding figure which, when I do take the trouble to imagine it (for one need not imagine a being to have one), I imagine as a fellow-imaginer: as an understandingeven an underwritinginmate. Any engagement in acts of reading, between that figure and myself, is engagement without argument, engagement without preliminaries, engagement without (in any of the usual senses) even a meeting of minds: there was never,

Page xiv

after all, a separation. To be a writer ''with" a reader is rather like being, oneself, of two minds, at every turn: hinge and sign. By comparison with this intimacy, the fondest act of physical love takes place between strangers.