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$16.00

Throughout this distinctive, uncompromising debut, objects of perception inflict small disturbances upon the mind in the way that, in our earliest sound recordings, the amplified human voice compelled a needle to cut grooves into metal foil sheets or cylinders of wax. Ever awake, aware, and acutely responsive to natural phenomena and manufactured goods alike, the speakers of McHugh’s poems are shaken into spells of peculiarly beautiful, idiosyncratic language by the force of what they see, hear, think, and feel. “From airshafts I hear rummage,” she writes, “a toothsong constant as a clatter of calves.” Sensitivity this heightened can wear the humble human down, producing “odd palsies,” “hives at the wrist” and “anxiety a heron / under (one’s) lung,” but McHugh invests her work with a spirit as hardy and self-possessed as it is painfully mindful of “another swarm mounting within the swarm.” This is a powerful, nervy book, written with bravura, wit, and a way with the English language unlike that of any younger poet writing today.

—Timothy Donnelly, The Cloud Corporation

From where, off-kilter, as through a cracked window, comes McHugh’s astonishing poems of wrack, of wreckage, this night of eerie monologues, this ligament-strung music? From the long holler, from some old agrarian religion, from hiding children “stacked like firewood under the cellar stair.” From where, against the violence of being “in earshot,” the minutest details of milkweed and death beetles are a necessary palliative. I cannot stop hearing this book’s forlorn and strangely comic song.

— Lytton Smith, The All-Purpose Magical Tent

Carey McHugh is my favorite poet, living or dead, and she’ll be yours, too—or else.

— Karen Russell, Vampires in the Lemon Grove

www.AuguryBooks.comNew York, New York

COVER DESIGN BY MICHAEL MILLERCOVER PHOTO LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

Poetry

AMER ICANGRAMOPHONE

AMER ICANGRAMOPHONE

P O E M S B Y

C A R E Y M C H U G H

Augury BooksNew York, New York

American Gramophone© 2015 Carey McHugh

ISBN-13: 978-0-9887355-5-2

Cover Photograph: “And Now, the Educated Hog,” by Harris & EwingCollection, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of CongressReproduction ID: LC-DIG-hec-35182

Cover Design by Michael Miller

Published in the United States of America by Augury Books. All rights reserved. For reproduction inquiries or other information,please visit www.AuguryBooks.com.

First Edition

Contents

[ ]

One

15 : American Gramophone16 : The Somnambulist17 : Speech after the Removal of the Larynx18 : Comes again like a costume of foxglove19 : Winter Drowning20 : Prep Guide for Basic Drill and Ceremony21 : Fragments from an Ex-Marksman22 : Instrument for Oversight23 : The Undertow24 : I’d Like to Get Rid of the Aforementioned Owl, What Can I Do to Make It Clear Off without Hurting It?25 : The Farrier26 : If it gets out that when you squint you can see27 : Self-Portrait as Shedding28 : I Already Own an Owl, and Am Having Trouble with [Breeding, Incubation, Feeding, Health, Personal Hygiene]. Can You Give Me Some Advice?29 : The Way to Be Lost30 : Diagram of Select Cuts31 : Car Wreck, Reliquary32 : Port Noise

Two

35 : And Now, the Educated Hog36 : American Chestnut Blight37 : Nightblooms38 : The Plenty39 : Aviaries and Asylums43 : Handsomely Legacied 44 : There is never a river, or I’m not speaking frankly45 : Biography in Increments50 : I Really Love Owls, Can I Have One as a Pet?51 : I Have Returned to Sell the House with You Inside

52 : To Note the Falling53 : Cannery Manned by Patients54 : Death (as a Woman) Comes for the Draughtsman

Three

57 : Seafaring to Tracheotomy58 : Forecast59 : I’d Like to Keep the Aforementioned Owl Around, What Can I Do to Encourage It to Stay? Can I Feed It?60 : Universal Carpenter’s Hex61 : Spell for Protecting the Dead from Being Bitten62 : The Aforementioned Owl Is [Sick, Dying, Injured, Abandoned, Possessed]. What Can I Do to Help It?63 : The Messenger64 : Winter creates an entrance66 : I Have a Little [Cat, Dog, Ferret, Aardvark] as a Pet, Will an Owl Attack and Eat It?67 : After a Housefire68 : Woman with Her Throat Cut69 : Yellow Jackets and the Sting Repeats70 : Supply Notes from The Home Book of Taxidermy & Tanning71 : The Haywagon72 : Original Migration Guide as Wholecloth Quilt

for Rob

[ ]

You will come first as a soundand then a breath

will come like a cold spell a hipbone

your lilt above the lake a crowcall you will come as expected in

iron weather will craft a blade

from the horse’s winter stall

In the barnlight I count the stiff ribs of my rifles gun oil

the floorboards gold with shells

there is migration in your coatyour crawl hinged the moon rusts

on its antique swing all winter over

you will find me armed

One

15

American Gramophone

Crows returning in large flocks to rearrangethe body of a tree. The sound of something blackand sharp flying into its own reflection; a folktalespoken aloud; a spell. In this verse a neighborwith one good hand lays a bridge across his creek.What is more reliable than this new wood growingfull of holes. The day is wasted watching horsesdrag their shadows the length of the field and back.The spine spoils its own alignment—serpent curvelike a shelled thing, seaborn. Legless. Weighted,the gate calls out. If I could choose, it would be a seatout of earshot. If the song were played againfrom the beginning, it would wind its own notes down.

16

The Somnambulist

From airshafts I hear rummage. And summer long. A matter of joint-rot and den,

a toothsong constant as a clatter of calves

and as blind. The needlepoint is (rootfringe on a dead fig) fine. Concentration here,

crosshatched rag and gall, the fibers gouged

with stitch-lift. Awareness is like this, the stirring low of swallows banking and impossibly

flown. Then a lamping in the wicker hour,

a stall, suspicion summoned or released, awake all evening like cattledogs unhooked from sleep.

17

Speech after the Removal of the Larynx

This transcription is a measure of the distances between sounds and their captors.My earliest memory: silence, a waterbird’s insistence, hovering. There are some currents that take up anything that falls. I took up the yarn, wound it repeatedly around the hands. I said my earliest memory is of rabbits darkening warrens. A swarm of hornets is articulate. There is no difference between sound andcommunication; I am satisfied if the strong consonants trigger memory. It is quiethere. Let speech be heron.

18

Comes again like a costume of foxglove

inconstant at every entry. Survival is a morning habit,a declaration of reversal,

a southravel. I learned balance from the collar bone, from water filled

with windswill. To pour is to allow the possibility of an animal

in repose, an enemy long in the arms. Comes again this version of night:

sandflies ticking themselves into a dry spell, igniting downwinged

in the earlywood. The sickness of violins. New sage greening in a blackbottom pan.

19

Winter Drowning

Then our words fell (fly-ash on a river) and failed us. Then the riddling

began: Because of the wooden well-top

shelved on the shore. Because of the old well’s open eye. We stood straighter: clavicle

and spine, common with timber

in mind. Catchweed called us back by the ankles. We considered the passageways

required for breath and everything slowed—

the snow filling the woodlot, the foxes, their stillness mistaken for self-possession.

20

Prep Guide for Basic Drill and Ceremony

The heart is dull cutlery thinks soldier number two

from the medic tent. He wants to say to the others please

stop saying bombshell. The saw is kept in the standard

issue surgical kit. The first thing you see is crabgrass

and maybe a terrier. At rest-on-arms the rifle mouth

holds the boot toe. In a work of art called ribs removed

there is only the drawing of a corset. The ribcage prefigured

the roof beams thinks number two on his back in a field.

The first things you hear are embroidery shears. Wolf spiders

hang in dormers on the porch and think of the weight

of a pin curl in the palm. At parade rest the rifle butt

confirms the ground. Epaulettes arrive in an envelope.

21

Fragments from an Ex-Marksman

Nights, I hid in the rail-yards, now newly darkened by a power outage that has signaled a loss greater than what I can gauge hourly, more religious

than if wheat had taken the tracks over and spread until the sound was a switching rather than the bell of work I had grown accustomed to. No armbone

was ever unearthed there. Nowhere in my recollection is a stray wren picked off a trellis from any distance. I won’t say how long I looked. How the targets became

something I intuited. The war carried the bellworkers away, melted the shells of my hobby, a threat like a hit measured in the millimeter before invisible. There are

no longer women in muslin at any event. No thin wrists. Let’s have a round without aim, a snapping off of a target as it tears away—the wishbones I broke

with my brother, my mother spilling the good portions onto our plates first. It is easy to be spared: as children we hid together, stacked like firewood under the cellar stairs.

22

Instrument for Oversight

The way the hayloft holds this view: unmannedfences, the increase of instance, of cattle the persistence of this lamplit, inclement year.Patient, eventual, brittle, misshapen,

one note lower than fear, your childhood is prairie-evident, delicate, waiting to leave

in pearls. What I want is an instrument for oversight,a partial dissolve of sadness and its grasses, strewn

and your voice in the light rot of perfume saying The bug is not in our bedding. Mint and sorghum mark

the farmhouse wall, another thickskinned thing and despite the oversight I recall the hayloft

straw-dark like a winter sun, the bales tacked in ricks brick-heavy that you hooked out over me one by one.

23

The Undertow

I prefer the piano’s back against a load-bearing wall.

The song, smothered. There are other hazards: the moon

halved and low in its black current. The hares startle,

stand. Lord, let me tell you about danger: the undertow

in every human body cannot be surgically redirected.

I am a tide of salt. It isn’t the sting as much as a plea

to preserve. The body is on loop with alternatives: show me

suffers under intense pressure. Show me declines to be

airlifted. They say it is winter. Whiskey, help me to my seat.

24

I’d Like to Get Rid of the Aforementioned Owl, What Can I Do to Make It Clear Offwithout Hurting It?

Removal without harm is never easy. In the aftermath of some removals, I couldn’t say if the wreckage in profile resembled anything other than itself, aflame. After dark it is more difficult to search, but easier to imagine. The light comes from the birds and is impossible to pin down. What connects the splitting dark to the round eyes of nocturnal things? There is a feeling that they are descending. The fog spooned into the hollows of the hill. Tell the trees to pin me down or clear out.

25

The Farrier

Early one morning on my way for iron,autumn arrived, pocking the ground

with ovenbirds, nicking the white knives

of poplars, their scissored bracts, keeping track of small fatigues: cords of wood,

the leaf-fall that finally levels. Decay

opens out like a colt, composure working backward toward panic. Always this

pall before the hoofstep, the damp knit

of soil, wooded underbelly, muted like a crown of maples. In this I have

fixed the thought of ore: a hammer exacting

after the lift of it has passed, iron as dull want; vise, a dark stall. I say forge to ready

the legs, to coax the knuckled trunks still.

26

If it gets out that when you squint you can see

the empty spaces of the trestle bridge shudder under the train’s iron, you will understand

the soft mechanics of the inner ear. I once witnessed a pack of riverhogs wasp-stung

to whistling, marveled at the machinery of their hurry. The evening startled me

like a stranger in the corn dressed for the quitting whistle. I need a heart with more cabinetry

and empty chambers for rehearsal. Take off my overcoat and put your hands here, stranger.

Jolt the branch that holds the nest. I thinkof timber when I think of giving in.

27

Self-Portrait as Shedding

Odd palsies in the redof a desert. Hives at the wrist,

anxiety a heron under my lung, winging up

openmouthed. There is no bodyof water here, no mangroves

to hide in. Only insomnia, stacked rattles stammering

loose in the tail’s slowtaper, scales also

worming away, a reminderof this privilege: to reappear

whole, having indulged the strange bird its hollow bones inside me.

28

I Already Own an Owl, and Am Having Trouble with [Breeding, Incubation, Feeding, Health, Personal Hygiene]. Can You Give Me Some Advice?

Where there has been drought is where I will plant,with minimal exertion, the fishing line to be tangled with a nonspecific nocturnal bird. I too am having trouble

with the living and their upkeep. The dry grass itches, inviting fire. Behind the camouflage in wait, I hint that whatever moves will move me

too. Is this type of advice of interest? A clue for detection or an element of description is critical for survival: the tall grass carries quail in its jaws.

One could find the time to learn a ballad. Woodsaw, hatchet, I would prefer to leave sharpness indoors.

29

The Way to Be Lost

Thought to light a fire. Thought to wonder with what repurposed rod I might be caught. The mariner inside me said what is the flight path of the nearest auk? How can I tie a compelling constrictor knot? The krill are difficult and the window is not a window but a pocket. The way to be lost starts with the foot of the coast, the marsh giving in. The curve of it calls up sickle. Calls up rot from the orchard, fruit bats and black bread. I am sick for the occasion of forsythia, receding or wilding all around me like a nimbus or a nest of hair. There is nothing new here. There is still nowhere to sit. I am searching for the someone else at fault.

30

Diagram of Select Cuts

Divided like a continent. Spitting image

of the British Jack. Brisket I whispered,

disregarding the language of the area

I am on to you. Who doesn’t want to be

reconfigured? Asking nothing of the condemned

but bones and a clean break. This close to you

I am skeletal, sir, unlucky. The structure

is already underway, its spiked beams and bright

steel. How will this distress be concealed

in the pictorial dictionary? A diagram of select

cuts. A coat of arms with Catherine Wheels.

31

Car Wreck, Reliquary

No logic in the scattered—ankle or fingerbone intact as here. Or lifeless, as here. A man holds one hand in the other close to his body. This is what must be done: the propane tank is empty, a horse stands unsaddled. We repair this way into landscape, call it gravel-fly in the deserting. Engine, an illness,this highway, a secondhand sleeve, unforgivable in length. We are held up in the body we arrived in, tucked and unlucky. It is too early to tell whom to count among the missing. Sage along the shoulder makes scavenge unthinkable, and what is never found is most revered. Without ache or envy, I sit thickened in my good coat. In this landscape there must be an undetected pageant between sainthood and frenzy.

32

Port Noise

From now on I will consider regret a winging tern, reinventing tempo, punishment, apprehension. I will not miss the cold darts

of your hipbones gathered and alive or drying in pockets on the line. I will not survive another snowbound winter here. Let fold what will

not keep. Hang the carp mouth down (alive). Resist the flail, the panic and its sound of strings rusting under weather. All along the stiff bow carving

a new complaint: impatient, taking leave, strong and on the rise. Love, it must have seemed like song.

Two

35

And Now, the Educated Hog

You could say it was an adjustment. Like a tree

uprooting inside me. Like being bricked up

in a silo. Even the sun put me to sleep. At first

I was content without a knife. Then, I couldn’t walk

across a field without dreading roundworm. I counted

weak spots in the fences, but the numbers took on

dimension like the sketch before a painted portrait.

I didn’t want to meet anyone new. I couldn’t stand

in a river without quoting Deuteronomy. The scarecrow

hung with arms flung open as if inviting fire or a flock

as if saying how good is this view? I took it in then,

the panorama. I don’t want whatever you want most for me.

36

American Chestnut Blight

I am resigned to counting the removal of things already and unknowingly diseased. With regards to the smoke

and its furied plume, it seems the handle of the hand-ax

steered too near the flames, the barn, the mare, overtaken and restrained. If ending there, we will say nothing of winds

and even less of hay and fences. You are invited to this new

vacancy. Consider yourself, for the meantime, quite courted.I will leave the front wicket open at an angle pioneered

for your return. And of return, the slow mules have been gifted

to the soapworks. Winter is a shinbone on the ridge, seen through the blight in splits of ripple-gray and solid, ruined white.

There is nothing to provoke the creek in its camel bed and I have

worried my seasonal sumac to a steady weep. March will franchise trees disordered with worms worked in the roots. We are calling

it ruin. I will try four strings tuned in fifths to sound the falling.

37

Nightblooms

Subdued in the early heat, your stillness is symptomatic of something communicable and the overnight wither

of nightblooming plants which are, upon rousing, just short of beautiful. The pharmacy visits have failed to lift

your pallor, which reminds me that the deviant ladders of treachery are trellises, really, and should be offered

allamanda (in bloom) with attention to late sun and restrictions regarding the impulse to prune. We all feel it: One more unease.

One delinquent sprig. On the tendency of passengers newly embarked to carry crockery and cheval mirrors, it seems

while stripped of this art, they are more adroit, though further complications less royal than imperial attract a darker,

uninhibited sort: the Reticent Heiress (slow to acknowledge restrictions) carries scrap glass for a company of transients, reluctantly

pressed like violets along any given road. Your contemplations have become frameless, your ribs, the most obvious passengers

on this trip. If you reflect, you will recall a dip in perception,the intermission of authority figures, and various zoo hallucinations

(hyenas running like they’ve been wronged). In the desertthere is a center rise which replaces the notion of steamroll

and wall-to-wall. Here the violets issue a wayward blueimpossible to sell, let alone to capture, souse, and misconstrue.

There is a fork in the lifespan of the saguaro, the souvenir of one hundred years in bloom. What revives nightly returns slow

and groomed with arms up and spine. In sleep, closing and wasting hourly, your unmistakable gold pall thrives, is unmistakably mine.

38

The Plenty

Before language, humans used pinecones to show affection. At this point in our evolution, I covered

my face. I baited a hook with new materials andmisheard conversations. Which of the following

does not constitute a river: a bucket with a horseshoe crab, a bandsaw labeled spinning wheel, farmers

with hands for pitchforks. There is something not right in the farmwives here. We see a profound absence

of hoofprints; the crescent moon is set like a trap. Plenty of what is abundant is left to rot in rows.

There are hammers, which is another bad sign. One man held a hammer to his face like an opera glass.

39

Aviaries and Asylums

1. The Courtyard

Other thresholds we have chosen not to oppose: memory, driving snows, our own tongues pushed mulish and still. Panic comes

in human form: the warden’s daughter, a flightless bird, took feathers from the courtyard and the outer walls grew plumage in the dark.

In the light (cabbage heads failing in rows) we watched the empty grove with our own handbooks on expectation.

How can I recreate the darkness, a cinderblock my canvas. Rescue is like a coat unhooked you said. I could not see close up. The landscape,

a whiteout from where I looked, a constant storm. Sunup under the steel, daybreak over the yard: the buffing wheel

and snowplow block out the birdsong. Come, the courtyard is brittle with plumage and tile. Each wing we assemble lifts.

40

2. Assembly

Imitated pigeons (to indicate motion). Arranged granite topknots for birds of prey. Considered this my convalescence. Reclined awhile, reckoned my obsessions in the guinea grass. (Wainwrights,

metallurgy in the interim.) An embankment of mudstone might catch the bullet spray, might flag in the heat like a mute, his unlit pipe. (It is difficult to determine if accumulation

indicates insight.) Impalas at the railroad bed. The sky will cistern, the weather wired for an autumn afternoon. Among ptarmigans, kestrels, I am kneeling alone. I am setting the stream to run.

41

3. The Warden’s Girl

Springbok, thawing shrub: the lonely give up in stages. I will show you

the end of knitting: a pearwood hold for yarn replaces thumbs; bad weather

in the bark of trees. The warden’s girl pronounced herself through with dexterity, let cards

of wool unravel, pulled ribbons from the low fog, her hair. She relearned cut

in ironheaps and loved the men with foundry jobs. What is required beyond this

separation and composure. There is an empty space at the end of knitting. The season

sharpens there. There are no cards of wool. Rigid thumbs await us in the pearwood.

42

4. Escape

Each wing is tested for quill and nerve.

Beyond the hurricane fence, we imagine birds

wintering on the cape. Otherwise, we come

to the walls though our manuals know neither marsh

nor escape. On a night with a moon, we dig

where the sinkhole meets the hill, our ligaments

cobbling bones to some motionless middle. The heft

falls shovelside. Tonight the marsh is a riddle

of breeze and milkweed. The stems change men to birds

and, like troutlines, hold them still, sometimes slack.

Fires light up as usual and we watch the dirt as beetles

slowly and single-handedly take to death on their backs.

43

Handsomely Legacied

He was a profiteer, pockets lined with goatskin in the second year

of the war (the horse more vicious the mare lame) made on the black market stayed

three and a half years alive came home with a brace of partridges a cabin crew of five to a tragedy

at the state theatre the winter garden in full bloom the asparagus, over

The debts exceed the assets

Your green dress is very becoming

I am hoarse, the misunderstanding is regrettable

He squints a little, badly bruised has forgotten his signature and cake

of good soap has burned the linen with its pocket for cotton wool cursed

the Baltic her reel of blank currents her own hands and invisible mending I should like to travel

without breaking the journey there is no ink in the ink stand love the boat is heeling over

44

There is never a river, or I’m not speaking frankly

is how the auctioneer practiced his syllables, quick and quicker, the auction block topped by a heifer or hall mirror, each its own brand of dog-tiredand quicksilver. Prudent to question the handsewn, the room-to-grow. The cymbals are minor instrumentsused to punctuate the prison term. He was sober so seldom in the winter. Some regarded the cattle as academic, spines and legs misaligned. He never said goodbye with hands out front, but at his side. Listen to the voices in the fingertips he said. Hear out the knuckles,they are more often than not the first to fracture.

45

Biography in Increments

1. The Hour when Authoresses Dip Their Pens in the Inkwell

Careful sculling of script into rank: spare woodgrain,

mad spindle. Wharf, wheel-thrown women like straw

torn from bales and let fly the window dressing with its drab

of muslin, they say. Noon, by the pilothouse, men are woolly, pitted, away.

46

2. The Hour when It Is Forbidden to Say Dantesque, Michelangelesque

It is clear the greatest risk is afternoon, stiff with monks and the guilt of spring and mothers mailing trunks of knitted things.

47

3. The Hour when the Horse of the Future Thinks Twice as Much as the Normal Man

Palm-sized appaloosa and chariot, unlit,

full-tilt with two small loads of whatever is considered

splendid. Whinny-stunt, hip stray hysteric; saddle-bare

on tiny, untrained hooflets. A rare hint to what we have

been shifting toward and all along, but unaware.

48

4. The Hour to Disregard the Linguist Club

Phase we refer to feet as dogs.

49

5. The Hour to Offer Things Feverishly to the Coldest Female Student

Seven small flaws, numbered with marigolds,

but neatly, in pungent, arcing strains.

Gray and baying (though trained), a meerkat,

unloved, with the threat of gorgeous markings.

50

I Really Love Owls, Can I Have One as a Pet?

Like wind if it took muscle from water and not the other way,a bird of prey is a big responsibility. I see you seeing the world in conflict as it is in the days before your death, the colors cold off the trees. Science has proven nothing if not that birds

are constantly being replaced by newer, smaller birds. Plainclothes,help me to my things: the weathervane spinning in rehearsal, the lakes filling with turtles, even without you, they will not resurface, though I wait the whole winter over, a hemlock at the water’s edge.

51

I Have Returned to Sell the House with You Inside

But it seems the important documents are foxed. Returned to find the lakestill, reflecting back the ash and oak. Outside of my field of vision

something paces, presses inward. My sadness is streamfed, has left its watermark on every bank. The lake does not speak back but manages

with its hands. Landscape understands transience, a garden gone unsown.The grass is cattle-cut. The living are left to fend off whatever is wild,

and there is an endless sense that we are all on the verge of losing something vital. The widow thinks of her wedding china. In autumn,

leaves like linnets, the days cut close around the night, a weir redirectingmemory or light. I am paring down here, outermost and blank as stone.

52

To Note the Falling

The conversation, sour, like the land. The hourtold by heat and railspikes ringing. Climate

don’t suit my clothes woodsmen complained

and sawed sourwood in all the yards that year, the millwheel in pieces

for a change. The season was a succession

of men with shovels and a seasoning of women in stiff heels: the coquettish

without the plush. Ardent, insufficient, pulled

tight about the ears, insisting on rugs from the knitting mills and salvage art—

a headscarf, a hunt, a bored Virginia Reel.

53

Cannery Manned by Patients

We are forbidden during working hours to consider

headwaters, knotted gillnet threads, the setback

of salmon. Though farther north the banks are wide

with drought, we have stopped believing in doubt,

have learned to measure heft in tonnage and linen sack.

Among us someone has singled out monotony, locked

it in, dropping as we convene, as if from hand or eye

a boxed rhythm we are fighting. All night belted here

fingers loose on bolts and cobs. The stale business of tackle

to sift through. Here the sick collect. And the slack strain

of the jagging wheel rolls tongueless in its kick.

54

Death (as a Woman) Comes for the Draughtsman

But there are horsesto be broken. I spoketo the round shock

of her heel, wintered,calloused. A partial sketchcurled on the table.

Bulbs sat out to be buried.I remember the proudcold copper of her hair.

Three

57

Seafaring to Tracheotomy

The year I lived on a boat, rules were just. Sometimes

a hatch swinging shut would take a finger off clean.

The origin of pain is in technology. Cancers are waiting

inside and it is up to machines to find them. The lungs

are younger than the trachea, that’s why song sounds

like an anchor letting down. No accounting for cruelty

the cabin door whisking closed, the likelihood of another

swell. I hung a bellows in my lung that winter to drown

out the wind. I drew up the gangway on everyone I knew.

58

Forecast

If weather in the cradle of a birdbath,

if the birdbath in an unpredicted

snow. If the weather turns like a bird

into the crate of a wind then this sadness

is a flock, a formation moving steadily

closer. Today waking was like the heavy draw

of water from a well, deliberate and full

of ice—a reminder that between now

and then we can predict a filling up slowly

of leaves and frost repeatedly; possibility

visible but moving steadily away.

59

I’d Like to Keep the Aforementioned Owl Around, What Can I Do to Encourage It to Stay? Can I Feed It?

Look behind you. The hedges are truces

of clipped-back blackthorn and hazel. This is not

encouraging. This is what one might call a sticking

point. Expanse is subjective, but I have a hunch

that the universe is cresting a levee, edges

wild with burrs. In the after of captivity all

selves seem unsettled and, like wicker, a little shredded.

Like water kicking out over the falls. What if inhabitant

is just a word with a stovepipe and firedogs. Call it

what you will. Feed it on a first-name basis.

60

Universal Carpenter’s Hex

The unit of measurement most underused is the evergreenexcept in regions where it gives the impression of landscape

as inaccessible, woolen and refractory. I’m sorry

to inform you that there is no world beyond this one with its conifers and bad winters. You wanted this life

to be uncomplicated and insect-free, but the termites, prey

to ants and defiant in their own right, are everywhere unshelled and noncompliant. They honor a division of labor familiar

to older generations. Consider the devastation at the height

of a swarm! Help yourself. There is a mess of them, spilled like pills at night in an array on all the parquet floors. You will carry sadness

like a farmer or a Scotsman. You will be heckled by children

for the majority of your career. You maintain the cooper’s art is contrary to that of the shipbuilder, a steady hand to demand how much

can be contained, a light coat of woodflour on everything you touch.

61

Spell for Protecting the Dead from Being Bitten

Chest, harbor dark. Spine, unknot to ficus root. Shuck kneecap.

Wrist, bloom to basil. The wreck of shins, dry-docked. Neck

swivel, yellow jackets and the sting repeats. Eyelids, the beaks

of captured ships. Lungs, haystacks in a humid barn. Hands,

peacocks closing fans. Elbows, seals are in dens beneath

the snow. Hair, heat lightning, open window. Scalp, is anyone

listening. Ankles, insects consider maize. Ribs, carbines

on clapboard, muzzle up. Belly, stone against a burrow.

62

The Aforementioned Owl Is [Sick, Dying, Injured, Abandoned, Possessed]. What Can I Do to Help It?

I am not about to provide a list of tasks except to say keep an eye on the light

leaving this world. If the owl is possessed, it will hold a trace of this light in its terrible beak.

Who is still interested in this narrative? If memory holds, a donkey shuttled the island’s garbage

to the sea. All birds were in on it, and not even the deer had that much agility. Not even insects.

Note the silent approach. I wanted you to hover awhile above the continental shelf before finally

leaving this world of wharves and starlings, every threshold feathering as you passed.

63

The Messenger

We lit auxiliary lamps, tended themindifferently. A small part of the company woke:

the bones, their rigid endorsement of the body. Regret entered then, part barn owl, part spoke

as if propelled by night and axle. Outside the wind cut hurdles from birch; battles

stranded men along the river, cattle on the ridge. I am fond of flux, given over to green—

damp shingles on the springhouse, the seams of mold in the mill. I have followed this stream

like a horse: one errand, loose through cottonwoods. Found the lamps in all the parlors dimmed.

Tired then, on foot, the temperature at ends. The appeal cannot find a place: Cannot recover your son

from the quail-colored field. What I mean by temperature is flux, the slow fail. All our crops underneath old snow.

64

Winter creates an entrance

1.

a coming-up shornand solemn like waterfowl under a sturdy blade. It is cold knit work, your absence. Knotgrass flags on the banks, the green understory.

65

2.

Then with her lunacies and her kettle. Sulfur storms formed in the mouths of the living. Ice bent the orchard nearby, the plum-swing and difficult pears pressed to simpler wine. Dandelions turned

river-stone and slate. This is how I knew to blade a hatchet, bevel a canoe, work my way riverward towards the single blue fir that in cutting season stood, a hitching post, square against whatever sun the sky let down.

66

I Have a Little [Cat, Dog, Ferret, Aardvark] as a Pet, Will an Owl Attack and Eat It?

This city caters to itself like a blacksmith at a portable forge: the egg and dart, the modern drawbridge. Concertina wire, a suture at the river’s edge.

There is a strong probability that every passing shadow has a bludgeon and night vision. Think pickpocket. It’s brisk and more deliberate. I recognized my death

on a corner in a Polish part of Brooklyn. She had a burgundy scarf and travel case. How the human hand softens underwater is hard to illustrate. The peeling

palm, a bulletin. To hear what the nearly dead hearyou must hold your breath and think of yourselfin a surgical theater, opium heads drying in the cabinets.

Fear like a whaler pulling through the chloroform. No one hears the future mount with more certainty.

67

After a Housefire

Earthen cellar agape like a cottonmouth in a creek, too late in the year for creeks. The frozen birdbath, curtains

like hung smoke. We’ve drawn up the carpet at the tacks.

The floorboards, unplanked like railroad ties and black. Twin beds, twice an absence. The pitted roof wants tin where hornets and vines

enter like family and die. A thief escaped once through the bedroom

window. I have found that a house, like other boundaries, cannot contain the dead. They are barefaced everywhere. I have found

the thief in the cross-stitch of the house. What he has taken remains

unseen but deeply missed. Let us frame what we retrieve. Let us hang it.The house was always lit where glass shelves held the violets.

68

Woman with Her Throat Cut

First came the emptying,a sound like bats feeding

in the bottomlands, and aftera wish for wild cattle, water

oaks, and mud daubers cracking in the beams.

What did we know of collapse, of the arch of collapse,

its stenciled seams. Of husk without seed: this ruin we enter

into—enters us, her bent knees.Her lungs, oblique wings.

69

Yellow Jackets and the Sting Repeats

Black-chinned birds at the feeders, wingbeats

light with migration. In this sequence of flight and interference, I am afraid to sit still too long.

This morning, a succession of hoofbeats disturbed

a nest of yellow jackets. A repeating sting, with the sound like kindling catching, and I wished

I had paid more attention to spring, its relentless

and unusual brimming. When it gets terrible, I think to take my work to the treeline: the beginning

of hesitation, a stir, one horse out of form turning

from the herd. Will it always be this way? The warm sky orangelit, another swarm mounting within the swarm.

70

Supply Notes from The Home Book of

Taxidermy & Tanning

Outside this room of earth and shaved bone (a strange weather) the lake holds

the only light. I have come to anticipate this. Of autumn, leaf-fall is a thread

along a seam, red and gauged for a starling. This is departure, reworked. This is a single

holding vowel. Of winter: the treeline it cuts along.Of cutting: there is no other way but belly-up, firm

through the lung. Music to leave the body windblown. Grinding wheel, a gramophone.

71

The Haywagon

When something roots itself (the risk, the groundwork) how can it be so sure? Thisis a test: A man in a field hoists a scythe. At the beginning, there was more imagination. The oxen are snakebit in the clay. It is what we fear the most: being motionless. The surrounding coyotes are patient. The bale, its rolled yield hulks like a stag in the field. The sand under the stream is slowly sifting. How can I continue: The wagon on all fours, the hayrake with its teeth. Where I’ve spoken of earth, I mean burden.

72

Original Migration Guide as Wholecloth Quilt

And I crawled in. Listen to this: the simper I entered there had an iron sound, a limitless fiddle that was sharp at first.

Then, creature. I worked the floor hoops on all sides

into a new design, wove a new migration guide, but the cold came climbing in with winter in its teeth. I thought to coax

a still form, like recollection, but the old interference was warm

and handed down. Be still. The batting is paper thin. Our arrival, a bone needle (with repair in mind) and then

a pattern develops, one edge folded against disappearance.

Notes

“Speech after the Removal of the Larynx” is the title of collected record-ings by Harm A. Drost detailing developments in artificial voice creation (Folkways Records, 1964).

The owl poems take their titles from Frequently Asked Questions on The Owl Pages, an informational website about the habits, habitats, psychology, and physiology of owls (www.OwlPages.com).

“Car Wreck, Reliquary” is inspired by Robert Frank’s photograph Car accident—U.S. 66, between Winslow and Flagstaff, Arizona (1956).

“And Now, the Educated Hog” refers to an exhibit sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture at the 1928 Chicago Livestock Show, in which a model of a pneumatic hog described the destructive effects of roundworm via a hidden phonograph (Library of Congress, Harris & Ewing Collection, 1928).

“Handsomely Legacied” is a cento of expressions from a German phrase-book in the Teach Yourself series (English Universities Press, Limited, 1958).

The section titles in “Biography in Increments” have been adapted from Aldo Buzzi’s Journey to the Land of the Flies and Other Travels (Random House, 1996).

“Cannery Manned by Patients” takes its title from a description of inmate labor at the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane in Indianapolis, opera-tional under that name 1889 — 1926.

“Death (as a Woman) Comes for the Draughtsman” takes its title from an Alfred Kubin pencil sketch (1935).

“Spell for Protecting the Dead from Being Bitten” takes its title from The Egyptian Book of the Dead.

“The Aforementioned Owl Is [Sick, Dying, Inured, Abandoned, Possessed]. What Can I Do to Help It?” is for Norma Boh Hubbuch, 1915 – 2012.

“Woman with Her Throat Cut” takes its title from a sculpture in bronze by Alberto Giacometti (1932).

“Supply Notes from The Home Book of Taxidermy & Tanning” partially takes its title from the how-to book by Gerald J. Grantz (Stackpole Books, 1985).

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank the editors of the journals where the following poems appeared, sometimes in earlier versions:

Boston Review: “Self-Portrait as Shedding”

Cutbank: “Instrument for Oversight,” “Cannery Manned by Patients,” “Woman with Her Throat Cut”

Denver Quarterly: “The Somnambulist”

Gulf Coast: “[ ]”

Smartish Pace: “American Chestnut Blight,” “Comes again like a costume of foxglove”

Tin House: “Diagram of Select Cuts”

Some of the poems in this manuscript appear in various forms in Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c., a chapbook selected by Rae Armantrout for the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 New York Chapbook Fellowship.

I am grateful to those who have contributed their ideas, support, and sorcery to this book, especially Kate Angus, Kimberly Steele, Nicolas Amara, Robert Ostrom, Andrew Seguin, Lytton Smith, Timothy Donnelly, Lucie Brock-Broido, Richard Howard, William Logan, Karen Russell, and Robert Johanson. To my family, my friends, my teams, and my teachers—thank you.

About the Author

Carey McHugh’s poems have appeared in Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, and Tin House, among others. Her chapbook, Original Instructions for the Perfect Preservation of Birds &c., wasselected by Rae Armantrout for the Poetry Society of America’s 2008 New York Chapbook Fellowship. She lives and works in Manhattan.