POEMS

Selected Poems

▪︎ SELECTED POEMS
▪︎ POETRY ONLINE

Selections from Christina Pugh’s poetry are presented below. To read additional poems online or listen to audio recordings, please click here.

Two poems from The Right Hand

The church— had other beauties
but when the doors—-opened
like a flock—-we all landed
at Teresa and the angel

A woman was making—-the sign of the cross
like blinking—–like pushing
a lock of hair away

I asked my husband: how does it go
do you cross from the left
shoulder—-right—- shoulder——–what

I can’t—-remember—- he said and tried both ways

This faith was not mine
this——bite—–into colorless
this——flush with skin and bones
this eating——the circle—this
fingering of names—-that
bridge of bending—-angels

Flirt

The bank of cloud that night was like a smoother
lamb’s wool, a fistful you’d pull to stuff
a pointe shoe for ballet class. Or maybe the cloud
bank was more like the tiny cotton coverlet
in a costume jewelry gift box–the rough-cut layer
you lift to reveal the ring. But rather than acting
inert like jewels, the stars began to flee right
under and over the opacity, conserving a certain
dialect of flirt—almost the way Haider Ackermann
draped some spider web-ish filaments across his model’s
face and then fastened them with safety pins
all along the girl’s smoothly alternating thatches
of white and fuchsia hair. When photographed
from behind the scenes, the model looked
bushed, I have to say. Still, it was a privilege:
she passed for a ghost orchid. A syrinx,
with strings. This was on a Trocadero
runway in Paris, circa 2015—after the super
blood moon made its last earthly visit until 2033.
It was not exactly bloody, but La terre est bleue
comme une orange, as Eluard would say. In this case,
skies were black as an orange, or a peach
moon harboring illegible, gray characters south
of the huge, pale, scrolled cotton cloud curl
when I sat beside my husband and my friend,
the three of us staring at the sky charade
with all our legs pressed against the white rocks
bordering Lake Michigan, and half our neighbors
there too, with telescopes and phones. Don’t you
think the word beside says more about love
than almost anything else could? And safety pins?
They’re ammonite fossils of punk bands, strewn
throughout the landscape in our thrilling,
torn debris. So I’ll have to stay here
and make much ado. About everything.

Three Blue Butterflies

I. MORPHO MENELAUS

Foiled acqua-
moiré wings the
butterfly’s beauty-
mark hydraulic in its
purposes   his
hair’s flame lifts
you snarls you

II. MORPHO ACHILLES

Sea-bed in semaphore / an
eyepiece     wing-span
delft dye vat-dipped shingle
scintilla        :        truant
and acclimate     enfold
or infuriate:     SOS:
Don’t surround
Don’t surround
yourself with yourself

III. MORPHO RHETENOR HELENA

Neon heather sky-
lit bluer than moiré:

inseam of street
trash     lush mask-

contour     soul-
strait fungible

as raiment in the
crawlspace     radiating

amatory birds’
egg bulls-eye

As Tears

I’m thinking of his portrait: it’s an X-ray,
a streetlamp: the leash of his spine beads
skyward from his haunches’ cloud: he's
dying, but the X-ray's holistic in itself—
filmier and sweeter than my own
powdered, living bone. We’ll have to
call it seepage, weltering, erosion, or any
word that typifies a structure treading
oceanward, breath-word birding in the
scape of the raze. And tissue still a music
now, thus regally to burn as tears go by.

Twenty-Third

And at the picnic table under the ancient elms,
one of my parents turned to me and said:
“We hope you end up here,”
where the shade relieves the light, where we sit
in some beneficence—and I felt the shape of the finite
after my ether life: the ratio, in all dappling,
of dark to bright; and yet how brief my stay would be
under the trees, because the voice I’d heard
could not cradle me, could no longer keep me
in greenery; and I would have to say good-bye
again, make my way across the white
California sand and back: or am I now creating
the helplessness I heard those words express,
the psalm torn like a map in my hands?

Rotary

Closer to a bell than a bird,
that clapper ringing
the clear name
of its inventor;

by turns louder
and quieter than a clock,
its numbered face
was more literate,

triplets of alphabet
like grace notes
above each digit.

And when you dialed,
each number was a shallow hole
your finger dragged
to the silver
comma-boundary,

then the sound of the hole
traveling back
to its proper place
on the circle.

You had to wait for its return.
You had to wait.
Even if you were angry
and your finger flew,

you had to watch
the round trip
of seven holes
before you could speak.

The rotary was wired for lag,
for the afterthought.

Before the touch-tone,
before the speed-dial,
before the primal grip
of the cellular,

they built glass houses
around telephones—
glass houses in parking lots,
by the roadside,
on sidewalks.

When you stepped in
and closed the door,
transparency hugged you,
and you could almost see

your own lips move,
the dumb-show
of your new secrecy.

Why did no one think
to conserve the peal?

Just try once
to sing it to yourself:
it’s gone,

like the sound of breath
if your body left.

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