Heather McHugh: "The Size of Spokane"

 













The baby isn't cute. In fact he's

a homely little pale and headlong

stumbler. Still, he's one

of us—the human beings

stuck on flight 295 (Chicago to Spokane);

and when he passes my seat twice

at full tilt this then that direction,

I look down from Lethal Weapon 3 to see

just why. He's

running back and forth

across a sunblazed circle on

the carpet-something brilliant, fallen

from a porthole. So! it's light

amazing him, it's only light, despite

some three and one

half hundred

people, propped in rows

for him to wonder at; it's light

he can't get over, light he can't

investigate enough, however many

zones he runs across it,

flickering himself.

The umpteenth time

I see him coming, I've had

just about enough; but then

he notices me noticing and stops—

one fat hand on my armrest—to

inspect the oddities of me.

*

Some people cannot hear.

Some people cannot walk.

But everyone was

sunstruck once, and set adrift.

Have we forgotten how

astonishing this is? so practiced all our senses

we cannot imagine them? foreseen instead of seeing

all the all there is? Each spectral port,

each human eye

is shot through with a hole, and everything we know

goes in there, where it feeds a blaze. In a flash

the baby's old; Mel Gibson's hundredth comeback seems

less clever; all his chases and embraces

narrow down, while we

fly on (in our

plain radiance of vehicle)

toward what cannot stay small forever.

"The Size of Spokane" by Heather McHugh, from Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993. © Wesleyan University Press, 1994.

Photography credit: Unknown (originally color).