Lindy Hough

The Sun in Cancer

North Atlantic Books 1975
ISBN 0-913028-34-7 $7.95
Plainfield, Vermont

The poems and prose pieces in The Sun In Cancer take the life in Maine and Vermont and rip it up in glorious tatters: the sun, the cows on the hills, the child delighted with water works, a poetry of place and the growth of consciousness, not so much reaching out to others as reaching deep inside to come up with a golden muck.

SO SMOOTH, SO LEVEL

i.

It does seem to be a disaster
to be a woman in this time. I can't
triumph over the sense of frustration
that fills everything up I do.

I painted a table white
& left it out after
the darkness fell

& it was wet
when I brought it in,
more wet
than when I painted it.
Things like that,
the fuckups of every day
depress me.
They're like the prosiness
which lives in my head now,
inhabits this poem like stuffing,
all sparrows
no purple martins.

But I'm lost now,
wandering in the woods for berries,
barricaded in an old house on the other side of
a door I can't keep closed, from
long hairy arms trying to get at me,
wondering how any woman
makes of her life
more than an elaborate minute-to-minute holding company,
more than a sham.

It's exhausting,
trying so hard every day, all day
to coordinate life
and accomodate it
to my proportions.
Others fuck around, screw each other,
live in the now and bask in their counterphobia.

I can't do anything like this.
My size is changing now,
I'm not comfortable.
Some days I seem to be pregnant and some days not,
how I look is everything now, a real attempt to be
a sexual object, since all the men I know are

taken anyway, with that. We all grew up in the same
era.

But there's no man
who's going to save me.
I don't have any sense of a sequined self
which will beckon
"the man I love"

One's alone with minimal conditions
with all the prehensile organization
which co-ordinates the rest of the world,
a web among webs

I don't give a shit
about any man or any salvation
based on balling one man

& no family or friend relationship
is going to save me.
I'm alone
as any cow sitting under the trees
waiting patiently for what's next,
the brown blob
of her thoughts
looking out of blinking
fly-irritated eyes.

ii

I don't know what will come.
I wait, abhoring the passive,
and societal actions seem to arrange themselves
around me. He seems to be following me.
My mind is following him, keeping too much track,
not laying my own track before me as I go.
I follow him because I'm bored with myself,
can keep more of a handle on my life when I am stimulating
to my very self. We move swiftly & one concern runs out
before we have supplied the other, we don't know the speed
we are running at now until it is pain-stakingly clear.
I would like to be able to manage my life,
which means, not be led in circles by my thinking.

Yet always open
to the suggestive act,
the world loaded with
Christ & Buddha & your form
everywhere I look.
My back is itchy & when people write from England
that it's good at least one marriage seems intact
I jump, startled, & think,
the whole continent, the whole fucking continent
is afloat, and we are swimming fast to try
& grab hold of it.

THE BACKROAD TO BARRE

I take the backroads everywhere now because
I want to prove to myself that I am wedded to
Vermont and all its difficulty that I am not
expecting ease or for a minute dependent on ease
and am totally patient with the hardest life
situations even though I am not in the heat of
any moments that would totally undo me except of my own
choosing men and women can do what they want
although they will suffer immeasurably for their vision

When I follow them out and they come out where
they are supposed to it is a victory to me I
even don't mind seeing the young boys dressed
all in red checkers proud of their guns and totally intent
on the kill in the middle October drizzle, I like
seeing the men going to work wedded to the harshness
of whatever their job is, it is pretty difficult I am
one with them in the urgency to not live in a manner

that would indicate there is any ease whatsoever or
that this country has any ease because whatever ease I
have seen has been purchased at such great cost to the
other inhabitants who have been blocked out of the mind
intent on ease, at others' expense and although others
probably say of me she is living an easy life not for

one minute does my manner indicate so to any who know me
and that is perhaps the greatest kindness I can offer.