Debtor’s Prison Road

By Heather McHugh b. 1948 Heather McHugh

They let me go

at night, minus my timepiece, lighter,

personal effects. The air is always shaking

the same jars of safety pins: cicadas.

Song is my recidivism: always

I'm abandoning the road to stand

(unwatched, unseconded) in someone's

field. The stars (that are not mine)

tick fitfully, they always have

appointments. Punctual, six-sharp,

they are David's; they have lodged in his

death tent, have stuck in his mud sleep. Bad luck

leaves me a loan: no company, no katy-

did or promissory

note or night

can last.

The air

loses its nerve,

the old saw its eyeteeth and I

my words—my alwaysing and my.

II.

In hush the repossessors reach

the edges of the field. They pass

for shadows, sheep of ambush, animals of

permanence. They turn a black beyond returning

and they haunt the sleepless. I don't count,

who cannot earn my keep.

Source: Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)

Biography

Poet Heather McHugh’s work is noted for its rhetorical gestures, sharp puns and interest in the materials of language itself—her self-described determination is “to follow every surge of language, every scrap and flotsam.” Describing her work in the Boston Review, poet and critic Richard Howard alleged that “most of McHugh’s poems end in a spurt, as they proceed in a slather, of just such astonishment as is bestowed—afforded—by . . .

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