Heavenly Bodies (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

Huntington, Cynthia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809330636 ISBN 13: 9780809330638

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012

Synopsis

National Book Award Finalist 2012

In this blistering collection of lyric poems, Cynthia Huntington gives an intimate view of the sexual revolution and rebellion in a time before the rise of feminism. Heavenly Bodies is a testament to the duality of sex, the twin seductiveness and horror of drug addiction, and the social, political, and personal dramas of America in the 1960s.

From the sweetness of purloined blackberries to the bitter taste of pills, the ginger perfume of the Hawaiian Islands to the scream of the winter wind, Huntington’s fearless and candid poems offer a feast for the senses that is at once mystical and earthy, cynical and surreal. Echoing throughout are some of the most famous—and infamous—voices of the times: Joan Baez and Charles Manson, Frank Zappa and Betty Friedan. Jinns and aliens beckon while cities burn and revolutionaries thunder for change. At the center is the semiautobiographical Suzy Creamcheese, sensual and rebellious, both almighty and powerless in her sexuality. 

Achingly tender yet brutally honest, Heavenly Bodies is an unflinching reflection on the most personal of physical and emotional journeys.


Univeristy Press Books for Public and Secondary Schools 2013 edition

Finalist for the National Book Award in Poetry, 2012

About this title

About the Author

Cynthia Huntington is the author of four books of poetry, including The Radiant  (winner of the Levis Prize), The Fish-Wife, and We Have Gone to the Beach, as well as a prose memoir, The Salt House. A former New Hampshire State Poet Laureate, she is professor of English at Dartmouth College where she serves as senior faculty in creative writing. She served as Chair of the Poetry Jury for the Pulitzer Prizes in Poetry for 2006.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

DELINQUENT

Odd that the office would be so bright, painted in warm
shades of butter and honey, while outside the light

slammed down on fenders and on concrete posts and frozen
snowfields glazed with melt. This lockdown they call spring.

I had, God knows, no love for the grackles
mobbing the edges of the parking lot. The ice had melted

at the edges of the asphalt, and the frozen earth appeared to yield
some crumbs of seed or grass or insect carapace, yet I could not

stop watching them shoulder each other and threaten, with their
street-punk strut, bickering over privilege to pick at the hard ground.

In winter everything is winter and some must die, I thought.
I slouched in the blue eggshell chair, pulling at a thread

unraveling on my jeans and would not look up; sun hit my eyes
as voices hammered talk of consequences. All that was desired

lay frozen at my feet, lay on the other side of the wall.
I would fly through the window, scattering daggers of glass.

I would disappear in flame, leave only a shape of char.
When the world is your enemy, and speech an invitation

to open season on your body: slapped for a word, arrested for a sneer,
even silence a gesture interpreted by double agents of the mind,

give nothing away. Lock down. Hunch forward. Erase your face.
When they take you, as they will take you, away to where

they are going to take you, you'll be wound so tight you'll bounce;
you'll make a rattling noise on the ground, and whatever they break

in you, or break out of you will drag along behind, banging
and scraping, giving off long shrieks, obnoxious to their ears.


THE JUDGMENT

Butternuts are dropping from the branches
the wind is thrashing this dead November.
Sky under my window white, empty

down to the ground, sky at the root,
sky in the clenching grasses, raining
dark green butternuts into the earth.

On the green landing, at the turn of the stair,
forbidden to come down, I make day
at the window. Hidden inside the drapes,

their swelling folds, their oak leaf pattern
like open hands with veins and small creases,
self-shrouded, I watch wind flay the trees.

Her palm raised to strike. Do not come down
again today, or let me see you. Do not cross
my sight, she said, to save me

from punishment, to keep herself
from hurting me. Mad child that I was,
did I want to make her hurt me?

The tree is wildly drumming its branches,
like something trying to get free of itself.
Like an error to be shaken off. My arm hurts,

the burned patch reddens. Leaned against
the window's chill, the raw flesh shines.
She screamed and spun in fury; boiling

water splashed over the pan, splattering
down-my fault, my error in surprising her.
Again my error, irrevocable . . .

The wind is tearing down the butternuts;
they pound the earth like someone kicking
at a door. Some split open when they hit,

the ridged seed hard and black inside,
the oily flesh ripped loose. They fall
into the earth and sink under the leaves.

The print of her fingers on my cheek:
a scald. Damn you! Damn you! she cried,
and I felt the air ignite. I want to go

and hide under the tangled grass,
and shrivel to a seed as hard as wood, to let
the hurt flesh wither and fall from my bones.

I want to be flung down by the wind, to lie
on the wet ground under leaves and sink
into the earth and find that deepest hell.


COYOTE

Do not invite him lightly to your bed.
This is a man of persistence and great sloth.
Sweet leaves brought slowly to the mouth; the branch
Bent down, low constant sounds, a hum along

The neck, the nape, the nipple-his tongue's long,
Ostensible kisses. This is a man
Who wants to rearrange your furniture, to devour
Your resum.. Do not ask him to see you across

The river. The glow of your cheek on the pillowcase,
Creased hieroglyphic of time the skin recalls,
Invites discovery. A branch snaps underfoot,
The leaves speak backwards: forget . . .

Your day job. Your night school. Your green canopy.
By morning your passport wears another name.


FOUNDLING

But to be the one renounced
in name of virtue-that's a bad joke,
a taste in the mouth like last night's garlic.
Sweat it out. Comes the wound without the honor,
like the martyr soldier's horse.
Insult to fibers moral and connective.
Do I shame you? So I shame you.
Your secret's showing, not to be spoken.
Rumor in the blood refused: call me applecart
upsetter, homewrecker, closet skeleton;
the story is well known. The hills above this city
are scarred with infants' bones.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809330636
• ISBN 13: 9780809330638
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 86