Sample Poems by Christina Pugh
Church Street
Like a market with no wares,
this street of song greets you every morning:
an avenue of appeals and half-told stories.
So which palm or paper cup
will get your windfall of change
from buying newspapers and milk?
You can’t judge who’s neediest or coldest
on winter days when the voices are the loudest—
Help a hungry epileptic, help a hungry epileptic—
but this repeated epileptic wakes your inner ear,
its second beat alternating half-tones
on the chromatic scale: perfect pitch.
Hello, ma’am. I live in a homeless shelter,
and I need to get a few dollars together
for a bite to eat. Can you help me out?
The voice of an orator, groomed for the podium,
Ciceronian. Sometimes I almost feel
my tailbone scrape a sidewalk’s crack at sunrise:
pitched from the lean-to of furnished life,
chanting like Lear’s unaccomodated man—
Spare change, sir, ma’am, please?
Enjoy your day—or silent as the man
at the corner grocery store, his eyes closed to the sun,
his palm curved for a shower of silver.
Rose City
The bleared petals
in my failed photographs
bloom again in the streets
that become, this time
each year, a city of roses.
From railings, over trellises,
I’m offered cup after cup
of blank: well-bottom colonies,
foil to the sharpened mum
or the black-eyed Susan.
Like holes, the roses
won’t articulate,
resisting me
just as they resisted
the camera’s perspicacity,
its tiny window trained
on overflow.
I can hear them
tear at the earth’s precision:
quicksand, blind road,
the siren sheen
of the magnifying glass.
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.
First in Flight
You thought you’d lost that old dress
years ago in a moving truck
or left it for the Salvation Army;
you thought it went the way
of turquoise eye shadow,
bell bottoms, a platinum fall—
but here are the Wright Brothers
silhouetted in polyester,
floating in folds beneath the bodice,
and fresh from Orville’s wind tunnels,
their scarecrow of a plane—
all straw joints and no muscle,
once grounded at Kitty Hawk
after four low-sighing flights,
the porous warp of its wing in tatters.
Unfold them. Do you remember 1973?
Drape yourself in the faded sheath
and raise a phantom wine glass
to the eaves: now Orville’s face
balloons in triumph, twelve
long seconds in the air—
now Wilbur’s nose punctuates
the curve of your left knee
in contrapposto. Again you’re beautiful
as the heights they imagined,
the galaxies they’d have gathered up
like marbles in their pockets:
two heads aloft for hours
in the region of sky
stretched from your breast
to your ankles, their shared name
looped in cirrus ink, and somewhere an aircraft
roars and hums in your wake.