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Overview
In Sunday Houses the Sunday House, Elizabeth Hughey embraces the possibility that we can learn as much from objects as we can from other people, from the inanimate as much as the animate. Each poem descends upon a place and a time, takes a few notes, and then leaves quietly without slamming any doors. Sunday Houses the Sunday House reveals what the world is like when your attention is focused elsewhere, when your head is turned the other way.
In ineffably beautiful verse, Hughey captures moments in time and place with confidence but without being judgmental. Although it may seem that the scope of these poems is rather small—a good party, a couple of eggs, a housekeeper's daydream—they reveal both a deep intelligence and a spirit of whimsy. Gertrude Stein wrote that she wanted to be "drunk with nouns," and in a sense that is what Hughey has accomplished here.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781587297267 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/2007 |
| Series: | Iowa Poetry Prize |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 68 |
| File size: | 312 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
SUNDAY HOUSES THE SUNDAY HOUSE
By ELIZABETH HUGHEY
UNIVERSITY OF IOWA PRESS Copyright © 2007 Elizabeth Hughey
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-58729-528-7
Chapter One SOUTH
Summer after summer, afternoon came upon the window that somebody had forgotten to close. It was a cab that took the first cool breath of seven o'clock. The streets were like corners, a modest variety of light. On the other side of thirty minutes, he remembered the black luggage. To travel linked to the history of unraveled lawns. Large country gliding along through brick houses, angular trees. Now the yellow nightfall. The tablecloth lit as though another South had decided to pick up the open sky.
VERONICA
How you took eyeliner and rouge and made your face into a tea saucer. Dark peonies heavy with tea. The way your face became a seated tango with a little mascara and the shadow that flies over the fields of Nebraska. I like how you took your lipstick and created an entire red pub with two drunks sleeping in separate booths. I can see in your powdered cheeks the yellow tooth of the polar bear, a zoo bear, in Alabama, anesthetized and dreaming, twitch of the whisker, paw slowly scooping a fish. Forget me not the beads that circle your neck, slip down your back, double spine, and go mousing across the floor to the wall socket that is not yet obsolete but not all modern and bewondering.
THE NAMING OF 1500
Some of the sixteenth century, as represented by snatches of Benedetto Rinio's History, was rather botanic. At an herbarium lined with floodwater, an elder can still hear the occasional eruptions of spindle berries. The sixteenth century is addressing an entire generation of plantsmen, shouting, Hi! Hi! across the valley of 1485. Look at each year in costume - 1511, 1533, 1555 - ever-rounded, herbal, discussing those trees, their cousinships with paneled doors.
HOW MUCH LONGER
Before I know the names of the existing, I am looking for a new bird. The Goodhawk,
the Noblenut, my funny bird pinned to the road, a new city. My feelings
about maps and shadows are so similar. Noun verb the adjective, adjective noun.
That is a car ride. I feel about parades what I feel about skipping pages.
Prayerfowl, Luck Jay, Blame Finch. There are many ways and many reasons
for the world. The cow lows a new milk in torrents into the pail. A field of eggplants,
a factory of basketballs. Let's not be sad about vegetables. If there were no births,
and all things were mined, like blue cabbage, marble, the coal miner
bringing soot-blackened lambs from below. Once you have spoken, twice I have heard.
THE LONG HELLO
I come in from the snow to find a new family in the living room, a smaller dog at a different bowl. I rub the cat, and a child appears: Welcome, Son. You were born the day I first thought of you, in a square, in Spain, after black rice. I shopped for gifts. You wanted a compass held by pirates. You needed it. Would I please buy it for you. In customs I said, My son has to have that farmer's cheese. He deserves the blue tulip. But the guards kept it all. I have nothing. And I am going to live this whole thing backwards next time. Poppies will fold and slide into the soil. Royalty will move into museums before they take them down and return the stones to the quarry. After years of eating saffron, I will know nothing about saffron.
TIED FOR IMPIETY
Those who have given birth, and those who have been born. Those who fear birds, and those who watch them. Who can't say no. Those who wear watches, and those who stop people on the street. Those who give up the world, and those who perform household duties. Who names, who faces. Those who hang up their clothes. Who worry about weight. Worry about teeth falling out in public. Fear deep water. Fear birds. Those who hold the door, and those who let the branch fly back. Eat the wafer, eat the flesh. Those who play the woman, and those who play the man. Who might as well. Who lost their chance. Who lift their shirts. Who take it out on their pets. Bargain. Never ask. Those who know their neighbors, and those who can't speak to squirrels. Who hang up, who have to repeat. Who hang themselves, and who sip. Who have one great night of anonymous sex, and those who take the last piece. Are never really alone. Are unattached to outcome. Who mop every night.
GOOD NIGHT '73
Now we know that the gin drinks do not matter. That grown daughters call their mothers around midnight from under poolwater. Smoking in bed. What is behind the door marked by the potted fir is not memorable, but to have such lines on wallpaper in a hallway, raincoat yellow, sliding down like firemen on poles in a dish liquid commercial on mute. This is how to make a day end for a long time. To fall asleep mid-moisturizer, hands above the head. Tamper with sleep until you get it right, and wake with shadow on the lids, as if blown there.
NO ONE NEED INVITE THE ANT
Hibiscus makes her own bee out of stamen and pollen. Sea
takes an hour to bring the wave. One breadfruit falls, and I am
cut down. Then another, and I understand. Coal
is not coal by blackness but by the fire burned clean.
When I move I fling chunks of light onto everything.
Bubbles blown into the sand made the sea, but why cause
the earth, why water, why dogfish. Light moving from lantern to sky
to lantern. That is a day. Larva twists in the beekept wax,
keeping warm the sweet in the mind that knows honey. The ox
bumping against the sugarcane. The boat tipping this way and that.
HOUSEWIFE
In the neighborhood people were turning off their TVs. I was walking home when her shadow covered me like squid ink. We said, Nobody helps me pick up around the house. By the time I finish cleaning, it's time to start cleaning. At night when I put myself to bed, she stays up in front of the TV, her eyes exchanging blues with the screen, folding even the cobwebs and stacking them on the couch. She is gone by morning, for errands, I guess. Tonight on my way to the bathroom, I pass her in the den. She says, This is the first time I've been able to sit down all day. I take her hand and bring her to bed. She says nothing. Her foot bumps mine like a cavefish under the covers.
TWO CAN PLAY
The carpool honks until the car turns blue then slips up the street without my son. I take a bus with him in my lap. Outside on green hills, goats bleat so loud they jump backwards. Now at the riverbank, That one is a tugboat, I say. He nods and his cap falls to the water, into the wake. That is a cruise ship. We get on and walk sideways through the crowd of people who are missing work and school. Should I feel bad, he asks. (Last night, at bedtime, my son took off his lips and hurled them at me. I rubbed softly away his eyes. He slept like a blank coin and missed his ride.) No, I say. This is why I brought you here, opening my change purse, but our conversation is cut short. Someone has lost their dog, calling, Ritzie! Ritzie!
SUNDAY HOUSES THE SUNDAY HOUSE
Who spent the night for church the next day. Stay Fredericksburg. Every room opens to Kathy. The heart from homestead. The map to go too far. Says Sunday house. Says womanly opposite. Says glass armchair. I'd like to cover the whole thing with rhinestone. The guest downstairs, unframed, whose background is reflected in the silver. Make the bed as Victorian as a stack of soap. Brick house adding fragrance to the mint.
A TEXTBOOK OF GENERAL BOTANY
When the 1960s were knocked down, I minded dreadfully the wounds of the countryside, the uniformed mansions about out of drawing rooms, the inheritance of over 10,000 rural surprises. All buildings were faced with honey-colored hamstone, trying to remind the supermarket of the Iron Age. Gardens hid behind bigger gardens. Unlike a 14th century sheep farm, granite nearly didn't end up in the modern world. It spawned smaller versions of itself inside notes, handwritten in ink, dealing with the only curb that encompassed the seedbed of ideas for a sustainable autumn.
TO BE SCATTERED ACROSS THE LAWN
I
Like a boat slipped free from the dock, fog removes a cardinal from a branch. The vacuum next door, the pine in the window, a man yelling fuck you from the street, prevent my body from dissolving. A baby crying mama keeps my arms from flying free of my chest to settle on the ceiling with a moth.
As one lamp is lit in Barcelona, I'm lit. If one bison exhales ... I sit in a leather chair that's on carpet that is on wood on cement on dirt, and when I forget iron, all the nails go back to where they came from. The house clatters down, leaving a flag hoisted above the rubble, and the radiator laboring on its side.
2
Is it possible we may have to start again? Laying down the roads, blueprinting the bridges. We get up and things have fallen into place. The oven upright, the fern in the corner. A stone wall awakens two centuries of grass. The iron and the oven discuss frost. The fridge and the window, flight. The nature of the washing machine matches the train's, but there is nothing for the buzzer and the whistle and the back and the forth.
Chapter Two WHAT BIRD
Bulbs, gravel, driveway. I had hyacinth on my mouth. The city, without thinking, will arrive with photographs. Or it could, even in winter, tap at the glass, at the birdbath, to be asked to speak.
EGG, EGG
The simplest way to be tender is to drop whatever you wish in a little pan. It will be tenderer of course to wait for about three minutes. The result will be tender like some kind of lace newspaper. Trustworthy, French. Delicate fish the size of new peas school and flow outward (I don't know why I said this. It is true.), on and on, in almost as many variations as there are minutes before.
THE ARCHITECT AND THE ENGINEER A TELEPHONE PLAY
Ask light what it wants to be. Ask metal to behave like glass. Let the elderly pick the park benches. And the children the drinking fountains. The hand is made for the elbow and arm. The hips, with starship scope, direct the feet. Where do the legs begin? In the waist. What if trees hung from clotheslines? And dirt cleaned itself. An antler, an artichoke. A strawberry, a heart. Most of us fall somewhere between exact symmetry and complete disorder. The solar planet and the polar sea.
THIS TIME I DRAW HIM WITH MY EYES CLOSED
Don't worry about ears. Intuit the nostril. The heart ends up outside of the body, a second one, unfastened and brimming, labeled everything. There it goes, up one shoulder and down the arm. Leaving the paper, now it is in the field, now the scratchflower. Geese cross the pond. Now, we talk about the geese. Now, we talk about the poem about the geese. How they do not mean to cast their image on the water. Nor does the water mean to hold the image of the geese.
LIT THROUGH THE NIGHT
It snowed. It was mid-May, so the sharp, and the red-orange, the sandy. Since 1919 was a home farmed in the temple like bluffs into every Spring, then the new trail lives hours to the east. We make our climate, grow cotton along the terraces more than twice as long as every place to hide.
A ONE AND A
In another room, on the other side of the country, even without speaking, you are apologizing to me. On this day in America, we all sit down to eat at the same time. Every chair in every restaurant is taken. Our mouths chew in the shapes of closed-lipped words: I am sorry. You look good. When you die, I want you to go to heaven. Then, the sound of caws from our chair legs as we push back from the table and go on. In the museum, portraits of stern men slip off their canvases onto the faces of girls. They'll be the judges, they say. I apologize for things I wanted to do but didn't, for what I have done, will do, and what I can't remember I did. With that, the party that I skipped eight years ago finally ends. Tony wakes in the kitchen chair, Adam calls a taxi, Katherine takes off her purple dress, and Dave and Allison move to Austin with their terrier.
VERONICA
There are plenty of koi snorting in the pond. Get all the blankets into the yard. We are having the picnic of our lives. I need a knife longer than my finger but shorter than that tree limb above your head, the one with the leaf on it and a lark clearing the throat from his air. Let's go again. Pretend we have not eaten. Fill all sorts of hungers with the teeny crumpet in your palm. The pond is behaving as predicted by the weatherman who said the pond will remain in the ditch and the koi in the pond and the worm in the koi and your head on your neck. My feet were warm when he said it about 99 degrees, and my earlobes held the most precise chill as if for a minute all the temperatures the day would be were resting there waiting to come and go. 65 and 39 and 40. I believe it is 43. Have another blanket. The tea is cooling. I hear a koi bumbling in the thermos. I believe your stole has mated with mine. Let's split the offspring for dinner. Soufflé and picnics don't go but neither do hats and bull's-eyes and look all around you.
MY PARTY
A girl only gets so many parties. Did you see my shoes? Did anyone
notice my shoes? I wish I were drunk. When I shop for friends,
I shop drunk. Will someone get over here and talk to me? I like sand dollars.
I like black pearls. I tried lipstick but I could not determine
where the lip ends and the nose begins. Where's the cake?
This is not my party anymore. It is the party's party. This is
the partiest party in the party party. Scotch squats in a crystal decanter
like a man in a dress. Even the perfume eats with pinkies. I want to go home,
because the party has elected, as a group, without words,
like a herd of moths, to celebrate something else. Taste buds.
The end of all work. No. For one moment, one thought bloomed
in each head: nobody wanted to be someplace else. The men
forgot about the game. The slim minnow of lust left the bellies of boys.
One woman faced the window and fit a whole tea sandwich
into her mouth like a bedspread into the dryer. Even the waiter
slicing the roast carved a thick piece in the likeness of his father.
COUNTRY SONG
The rain, even before the clouds have darkened, has already fallen. Leaves, too. When I received a letter from you, I had already read it. Night has already turned to day, and day to night. Cake, when just flour and egg, has already been sliced and spread across many tongues like air, which going in is really heading out, as are rolling curlers into hair. Nail polish, even when still in the jar, has chipped and scattered, a flake in the supermarket, a fleck in the sink, several caught in clothes, run through the washing machine and drained into the creek behind our house, which we've already left. Before we met, our children were asking for more milk and had grown. When we met, love was already there, but I hadn't stopped loving you. You were already gone, but I still loved you.
HAPPIEST HOURS
George said that before I met him he used to stay indoors drinking red wine with the curtains drawn on weekdays when he should have been at work. It is true. I walk back through the years, knock on George's door, and find him on the couch, candles dripping beneath a tapestry of the Tree of Life in which a canary sings to a sleeping hedgehog. I drink the wine. I sit on the couch. I tell him that soon his girlfriend's dad will come over and get him out of here. They will break up, but a redhead will come after. Giving in to an ultimatum, George will marry on an island. They'll have a baby named after a common flower. Some hot nights, George will sleep naked on the kitchen floor. It gets pretty bad again after that, so I tell him that I'll stop for now. He says to get from his apartment to a cornfield, you have to do much more than go left.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from SUNDAY HOUSES THE SUNDAY HOUSE by ELIZABETH HUGHEY Copyright © 2007 by Elizabeth Hughey. Excerpted by permission.
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