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Changing Woman

Io Books, Cape Elizabeth, Maine 1971
ISBN 0-913028-01-0       $7. 95

Hough’s first collection. Some of the poems herein appeared previously in Io, Tansy, and Truck magazines. Technically tightly wound, these poems reflect concerns stretching from mining in Colorado, to living rurally in Maine, touching on the life and work of Celia Thaxter of Isle of Shoals, New Hampshire. Hough writes about the first years of life of her first child, Robin, the horror of the war in Vietnam, out of control, numbing, endless. In the first years of the war Hough was criticized for not writing more political poetry; in Changing Woman it seeps in, challenging the ability of the poet to live a quietly domestic life when 48 bombing sorties per day are raining down napalm and destruction on North Vietnamese villagers. What are the psychic “thoughtographic” abilities of Ted Serios? Hough and Grossinger interviewed Jule Eisenbud in Denver for Io, (all this around 1970). The state of one’s own union with others; the revealed world probed and ceaselessly analyzed.

 Sisters: Polly, on right; Lindy, Age 4

A MATTER ABOUT DOING

less & less they found,
more & more they found,
how unusual it was
for anyone
to practice seriously
an art, a ritual, a magic
in the society....

**

The mountains the sea the sky the earth. Enough material to work with: the way of least materia, the muchness of sun, the lack of complication of actions. Nothing is important but being still. Being quiet, loosening the bands around the head so the cats come out to sit also in the sun. It is not that they think, I'd like to sit there also (that is my way of thinking) or that they want anything from me. It is the unusual ness of the figure sitting still & large where nothing was formerly. They would attend to rat, rabbit or giant in the same way.
We don't have to work all the time. We have achieved this. We do what we want; we have only to know what we want; it may be work of a new order. The work we want most to do is the hardest to do, the work that is easiest to do is what fits into the patterns we have grown up knowing. How long can I sit here thinking & writing before I stop my pen (my sun) and move to a level of doing, only another form of opinion, away from making constructs & finding older constructs, & again fitting myself into the parts of the material world, doing "my part" -- arranging and rearranging the material things of my world. Writing has to do with things, but living must have less to do with things if writing is to go on, as it wants to.
The words go on walking in my mind, trudging forward on a separate path from the brain which has commanded that I get up to fill the birdfeeder, get a sweater for Rob & one for me. Self- imposed necessity, actions which aren't at all necessary except in the mind of the doer. If they were the physical stage business of the doer alone, the mind and words running along in dialogue, that would be one thing: but the path of thinking is diverted by doing most practical physical tasks, and the build-up of necessary acts only enlarges, once begun. The preparations of the magician, but how many magicians prepare & never enact the magic.
So the poet must learn the science of hands off, what doesn't need to be done or thought about, where the energy is only wasted if it travels there; must beware rebuilding the celestial city described only in materialistic terms.
It must be a matter of degree, of quantity rather than choice. There is nothing wrong with the new technology, or participating in the garden, the canning, the freezing of foods, the sewing, the making of all the materia we once bought. It is a correct evolution. Yet it is still technology, and the artist must draw his line. I am not more or less wise after canning five jars of green peppers. I know another technological process, am more self-sufficient, I have a new skill in a society that rates technology the highest of virtues. But five jars sit on the shelf, not spiritual awareness, not a penetration into my thought- processes. If I fill up all my time with doing, there will be none to expose myself to the fire. It is not that we can fight all immortals ourselves as the technologist thinks, but that we must realize when our armour is no good (Odysseus standing still straight & sturdy in full armor, really believing he can fight immortals) but is pride & egoism & human small courage. Greater courage is the meekness to become a vessel for the words of the gods, to listen and hear Circe's directions for calming a god by appeal to another god.
So yellow slips away, taking red with it & it all lies on the ground. The leaves aren't shredded, the compost will be slower in the making, snow will come & each time I hear the excited barking of the southward geese over the marshes I'll run out to the porch to look, and watch their fading V's with a sense of desperation & loss & unpreparedness the careful farm housewife will never know. & everything will not have been done for winter, there won't be rows of shiny jars on the basement shelves. Not sure of the value of sun or stars or jars, I'll have written this book.

THREE POEMS GREETING APRIL & MAINE ON RETURN FLIGHT FROM KENT STATE

1

 Lindy in 1975

Easy as silk lying on new fallen frontier
April proclaims herself, rising, a rush
of heavy wings from
border-kings, pocket-pools; a chameleon sings
of faery seas.

2

Flying back over finally only patched
snow-covered Maine we are quickly inland

try to see key roads & coast of Cape Elizabeth,
briny girl we would recognize & coax into

coming home but the terrain yields like a
dead body to anonymity. Wide road is wide road,

planned oval of certain Scarborough Downs madness
is terrain cut/fried/liced, farms & woods

interact their own social behavior I
only look down, over see, & my plane's

shadow is the Doll's toy all below is meant to
be, a cool sunny day below the clouds.

3

Jealousy envy & excitement
from trying to do

another's work
is soon dead
& boring.

Rain drips
into dark cloudy day,

only seen
when I focus on air

at angles
involving distance!

Make it alive
(a furry animal
reaches inside its skin)

coming from inside the self,
a scaffolding there, a stucture

there, which happily
or not so
lives

on the shady side of the street
in the vanquishing anguish
of elms

*

A boy in class says that his pay from his very
good job in the munitions factory helped him buy
a new car. In his next paper, he proposes war
as a good way to eliminate exess people: shrewd
& realistic. In a further paper he says if the
guaranteed annual income were in effect, he'd
spend his time gardening & painting.

Huge crashing boulder of appetite
cascading on angels' downy wings!

Mind-charging cascade of dope-peddling
angel breakers!

Did Hitler harden, garden, have compost, have
composure, prune trees, get on his knees?

Too late for generalities
& too soon for specifics.
Mainly, too fast.

A PROPOSITION OF MOVEMENT

I am thinking of Christmas
& of whether to go out & buy gifts for my family
& of how women shouldn't have to
band together in flocks to get things done
& of 48 bombing sorties per day
over the Ho Chi Minh Trail to stop trucks
from loading & unloading supplies for a war
& of the land our house sits on how at 4:30 p.m.
the afternoon sunlightslants on the ball he
has flung to me on December second when its
not yet showed that I try to get Spindle back
into the house inadvertently chasing him deeper
into the woods noticing again while I do
the back of the barn which looks good where we
started shingling blond wood over grey last
summer
& the duck house & chicken house which
maybe we can have some chickens & ducks
in next spring
& how maybe we can live here after all
although there is a war going on
& a new house building in what was a
soft glen with a stone wall alongside it across
the street
even though we are too overblown a giant
balloon fish full of hooks too insensitive
to even know the body of Christmas

Let the Maker be heard.
Let the Soul's parts come together
& violent acts cease for Limbo
& Rebirth
Let all who murder deer & humans & birds
circle endlessly if they do not renounce
their unintentional intentional acts
to make way for those who care for the
land & the Word & the Spirit tucked
in the souls of every livingthing, & the
Way & the Self

***

There is a man named Harry Coombs
of Peabody Coal Co. doing strip mining
on the Navaho Reservation at this very
moment. Let him mine endlessly without
stop all his lives in burrows in caves
in tunnels as a snake digging without
surceaseGrowing up in
Colorado I have listened to the song
of this man all my shadowed life

Let the People grow endlessly powerful
& expunge him & his puny mechanistic
bandMake them flyLet the People
again graze at open clean waters, taking
flight to the mesas when fall comes

There is a morphology of landscape
strong as the lines in a palm,
formed when the alphabet was formed,
by black birds flying ovals overhead
This won't be improved by any form of
strip mining

***

Let Behemoth reign.
Let the Seamonster come to us,
Let him spread his briny weight
onto all our parts & days
Let the Lord of Light be Him shining
again the stars embedded in all
Our People's foreheads.