Poet's Choice

By Mary Karr
Sunday, April 6, 2008

Heather McHugh is a Radcliffe grad in cowboy boots. Her witty poems shift gears from Okie slow to spaceship speed. A translator from many tongues, she loves a pun, even when mourning a dead pooch.

But O the family dog, the Buddha-dog -- son of a bitch!

he had a funny bone --

A philosophy major, McHugh is fascinated by perception, how the world enters us streaming on light through the eye. "The Size of Spokane" begins with the banality of a nerve-wracking toddler jetting up and down an airplane aisle:

The baby isn't cute. In fact he's

a homely little pale and headlong

stumbler. . . .

and when he passes my seat twice

at full tilt this then that direction,

I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see

just why.

The baby is running through light spilling from the portholes, and the poet reminds us that "everyone was/sunstruck once." But so habitual are our perceptions that we forget to be amazed. The poem works to unpractice our senses and snap us awake.

Each spectral port,

each human eye

is shot through with a hole, and everything we know

goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash

the baby's old; Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback seems

less clever; all his chases and embraces

narrow down, while we

fly on (in our

plain radiance of vehicle)

toward what cannot stay small forever.

At the end, "what cannot stay small forever" becomes not just the size of Spokane, but the pin dot of light that a near-death survivor swims toward.

McHugh's new elegy begins at the graveside, where she has added three spades of earth, rather than the two everyone else hefts.

Not to Be Dwelled On

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.

(Heather McHugh's poems "Not to Be Dwelled On" and "Half Border and Half Lab" can be found in the November 2007 edition of Poetry magazine. "The Size of Spokane" is from "Hinge and Sign." Wesleyan Univ. Copyright 1994 by Heather McHugh.)