September 2006

Three Poems by Susan Hutton (MFA ’96)

Susan Hutton got her MFA from the University of Michigan in 1996 and held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford.  Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Poetry, Field, and other magazines.  She lives in Ann Arbor and is a contributing editor at the Poetry Foundation.  Her book On the Vanishing of Large Creatures is forthcoming from Carnegie Mellon University Press.

Seven Journeys
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In the Nag Hammad texts the Garden of Eden story
is told by the snake.  The petulant Lord hurls Adam and Eve
from Paradise and Jesus speaks in koans.
All this lost, forbidden, apocrypha,
but someone buried the stuff in clay pots just in case.
Some afternoons I walk my children through
the old cemetery and say the silly vanished names aloud –
Halloween, Belladonna – knowing the Egyptians
believed speaking the dead’s names could bring them back to life,
that Marconi believed sound never stopped
and that one day we would create an instrument
that could capture every noise ever emitted in a space.
We haven't, and that's just the beginning -- 
but bees can weave their honeycombs
from two or three different places and join the cells together
without leaving a seam.  And Henry Hudson's men knew they were near
the New World when they began to smell the trees. 

My List
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In ten years most things won't matter,
and this is the virtue of a long life.
Our sorrows fade after days and weeks,
are replaced by births, the smell of summer weeds,
a list of little happinesses.
A postwar portrait photographer in Warsaw hung a sheet
behind his subjects to hide his city in ruins.
After its return trip across the Atlantic
the Mayflower was dismantled and made into a barn.
No one remembers which barn it was.

On the Vanishing of Large Creatures
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I don't think the Mayflower's passengers boarded
with any inkling they would be revered. 
We imagine their journey with clean sails and blue sky,
and the galley was probably filthy. 
Meriwether Lewis finally reached the Pacific
after writing those dutiful descriptions of routes
and rivers and new species, and just carved his name
in a tree.  Michelangelo, painting the Sistine Chapel,
finished eventually and went home. 
But that fervor must be somewhere. 
As when the music finishes and floats off into the air; 
as when Stevens walked to work writing poems in his head,
and when he got there let the private part of his mind keep going;
as when Van Gogh kept painting himself in the asylum
because he was the only model he had.
And the spring river moves around the ice
and the floes chime out their ruin,
taking with them the shape of the winter banks
and the stones sloping down toward the bed. 
In bed the body's glorious grasp of its anatomy
will move off with its pleasure, and the shape of the bones,
the muscles and tendons must all be re-learned.
No one remembers when it happened,
but we were anchored to the earth in the time it took
to draw water, hand over hand, up from the well.
The stone wall stood unassisted all those years,
and the oceans were once filled with giant creatures
the fishermen stripped from the sea.

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