Poetry | Trade Paper | 0-916562-15-8 | $7.95 | 93 pp.
Truck Press | St Paul, MN | 1978
Written in Vermont and California, these poems and prose poems work the fabric of consciousness, ferreting out hope and possibility through embodied experience in the world. The narrator holds a passionate belief in the transformative powers and fluidity of language against all odds, and the poems are an action painting testing that belief. Most things can be understood, Hough seems to be saying, if one only will stay on it and focus; what is beyond our understanding you either sign up for or don’t. The two meet where one has skills, a vocabularly, and has learned the language, as in homeopathy and psychic work. Darkness impinges on everyone, on nations, on towns: people struggle against unimaginable odds and they don’t always win—they either die, or go crazy; sometimes darkness falls around them and there is nothing they can do. These poems sound personal, but that is a rhetorical trick; the single woman walking the road is universally emblematic of women too often constrained in various ways; trying to identify how to live courageously. Some of these poems appeared originally in Tooth of Time Review (John Brandi), Primer (Ron Wray), Llama’s Almanac (Linda Parker), and Toothpick, Lisbon and the Orcas Islands (Michael Wiater).
from the northeast, but I know when I get back it will seem
like no time—will we all have the grace
to pick up where we left off?
The trains of Berkeley go whistling through
at about 9:30 p.m., the children finally asleep–
quiet moves in, lonely like the fog
the brisk rustle of the night sea breeze,
a sax next door beginning to play
windows to shut & lock in this helter-skelter
neighborhood
Listening earlier,
Robby & I talk about trains coming down
from Sacramento, up from L.A.
the California Zephyr from the rest of the country
freight trains by the Bay preparing
to begin again to cross the country,
their mournful whistles and clattering–
Finish your story, I said,
when he couldn’t think of any more to be said.
A story should not be left unfinished
Part of the work is to try and not leave
our lives unfinished, but to reaffirm a totality,
every day § The Poet’s Métier What is my —
what you call it
my —
what can be described,
as, this poet
does this,
& that, this, I’m a cat on a fence.
The fire horn blows.
Those who live around here
can tell where the fire is from listening.
Just like I’m not here,
geographically, never really
settled in here —
There’s a skittering between my eyelids,
a sort of imbalance
only righted by walking
very carefully along the fence,
& then down another,
and another. I cover whole cities that way,
fence by fence,
never touching wooden back porches,
never having to cross backyards,
so light in my cat step
I leave no tracks.
But I never know
where the fire is,
& my poetry to others
& my self
is not easily classified. Is that a fatal weakness?
Does it mean that its
not really on,
like it freaks me
but no one else? If I wear a long magenta skirt
& a complex necklace
& high button black boots
& push my long brown hair behind my ears
with a quick flick of my hand so my face
can be seen better,
will I put it over -
& no one will notice? Instead of spending $48 on groceries,
could I buy myself
some really far out clothes?
I’d rather be a cat,
walking successive winding fences,
silent
& moonstruck. §
I have freed myself from a destructive vision—
Each day I watch my core grow into its own turnings,
even as my fingers find the right chords
finally to play, I exult so much in the lesson
I lose my place and can ‘t read the next note,
and play because exactly this exultation of
performance I haven’t felt
in the work of the life,
but as though I were turning myself
inside out like a worn mitten, taking out balls of fuzz
to fit a larger hand in,
so do I sense myself
cutting out suckers which sap my energy
don’t use it well,
excursions of thought
and fantasies based on others
a view of others which is media-
based, an endless publicity stunt—
One lifts the pedal when the note is played,
then depresses it, catches it again.
The counting now is not such an obsession,
the notes can be read, but with difficulty.
A tonic is the first note,
a dominant the fifth,
a sub-dominant the fourth.
It comes clear, like paste
well-mixed.
