I was ten years old when I fell in love with flying. I remember the day, the hour, the very airplane—an AV-8A Harrier. Stuck in a fifth-grade science classroom, perpetually bored and staring out windows, I was not expecting a jet to zoom low and fast over the autumnal tree line. The year was 1979, and the first-ever Worcester air show had begun. For the next four days, this extravaganza of flight would transform the skies above my hometown. The heavens filled with more aircraft than a boy could imagine: vintage biplanes, World War II bombers, massive gray cargo jets, tankers, helicopters, and fighter planes with mythical names like Skyhawk and Corsair, Phantom and Super Saber.
Hour after hour, I’d whiplash my neck staring into the clouds, listening for the bassy whir of turbo props at breakfast, the thunder of afterburners at dinner. The sun scorched my face; my eyes ached from strain. With the roar of each engine, I’d burst from my house as if it were on fire to gaze at the next airplane. How did people continue with their routines? There were no pilots in my life. The neighbors were teachers and nurses, shop foremen and letter carriers. My father, an avowed white-knuckler, occasionally traveled for business but hated flying; I’d never seen my mother board an airplane. Until that air show, the world of aviation was as foreign to me as a Moroccan bazaar. And yet, for one glorious fall weekend, the skies above me became dramatically alive. My soul was utterly hijacked—a conversion every bit as profound as a prophet’s, an annunciation so fundamental that my life changed forever. I devoted the next ten years to becoming a pilot.
Mr. Swiss, an organic farmer, walks out into his garlic field in the Okanogan Valley of north-central Washington, looking for guidance: Is the garlic ready?
Harvest has already begun in the South, the Gulf States and lower-elevation areas of the Southwest. “But pretty much coast to coast in the North, it’s usually mid-July,” Mr. Swiss said, with some varieties requiring even more patience.
But he doesn’t simply look at the calendar and start digging. He watches, and he waits. If you know how to look, he said, the garlic will tell you when it is time.
“To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone,” Yu Miri writes in “Tokyo Ueno Station,” a slender novel which has just appeared in English, in a translation by Morgan Giles. It’s an obvious point; why is it so powerful?
Poetry as life and death—may I term this struggle as survival? Seán Ó Ríordáin, the Irish poet whose oeuvre elucidates this limbo, looks no further than to the interaction of light with dark to explain this compulsion for the letter as both cure and curse.
What I admire most about this collection is that McHugh demonstrates her genius with language in a non-elitist way. She is relatable, never writing from the lofty heights of the mountain, but walking alongside us, inviting us to play, to puzzle out the strangeness of language with her. “Marriages of words,” McHugh says, consist of “Remarking something measureless.” Words both comment on (remark) and revise (re-mark) our understanding of the world. In creating a kind of word turbulence, trembles in the fabric of language, she shakes us into a new zone of attention. Unwilling to offer up clichéd ideas about anything (“my calling’s / doubt; my idea of a curse / is certainty”), McHugh invites us to question what we think we know; her poems teach us to look again and beckon us to find the enigmatic wisdom in the messy highs and lows of living. “Seeing isn’t believing,” she said in a 2005 interview with Matthea Harvey, “seeing is registering the unbelievable — which is everywhere. And so words fail us; just exactly how and when and where they do is dazzling evidence.”
Now, when we are more atomized than ever — by partisanship and political lies, by contagion and its economic fallout — reading Mary’s autobiography reminds us that life is important, but that living is a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end is, as she tells us from the start, meaning.
We already know we’re watched.
When we water the tomato plant,
spread ourselves along the couch with one leg up.