The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary
I.
Smilers, smirkers, chucklers, grinners,
platitudinizers, euphemists: it wasn't you
I emulated there, in that
Godawful place. What kind
of face
to put on it? How simple
is a simon's sign? To my mind
laughter's not the mark of pleasure, not
a pleasantry that spread; instead
it's intimate with sheer
delirium: spilt brain
on split lip, uncontainable
interiority—
(make no mistake, it is a horror, this
inmated, intimated
self, revealed as your
material: red smear,
white swipe). It's said the brain
stinks first, then organworks of art and eatery,
and then—what's left? a little cartilage for
ambiguity? a little tendon's B&D? At last, the least
ephemeral of evidences: nuggetworks (discrete, and
indiscreet) of teeth, bone-bits, odd scraps
of a delapidated strut—and this is just
the sort of stuff, insensate,
to which life (which comes again
as slime) has always
loved adhering. Life! Who wouldn't
laugh? Your inner life! Your pet
pretense! It can't be kept up, can't
be kept clean,
even in a thought,
except a good
bloodworks or shitpump keeps it so.
II.
Out of the mouth comes a tongue,
it calls itself linguistic and it
never quite effects
the cover-up (good
Lord, there's much to
cover up: so many belches, outcries,
upchucks, sneezes, puffings, hiccups, osculations, hawks and
coughs)—
so laughter (which, among the noises, prides itself
on being the most intellectual) can't help
but come out, snorting. Nothing
smiled or mild or meanwhiling—a laugh's
got teeth to send it off,
and spit to keep it company, and rot
to end up with. Its closest kin is grimace, it's
a grimacing with wind.
It will (the will
be damned)
burst out
in bad cacaphonies of
brouhaha and borborygma—it's the
stockbroker of mockeries, a trachea rake—
the vent of rage and irony, and right
there in the very
shrine of signs. A laugh, I mean,
is sorrow's
archery and signature,
while flesh is being
hoisted and arrayed
on roosts of skeleton.
III.
I saw what good
comes to; I saw the figure
human being cuts, upon its frame.
The laugh was a cry from my own
perscrewed, misnailed, cross-crafted
armature. Despite
your consternations, oh you
meekened warners and polite
conventioneers, the thieves were better
served upon that day. For the heart
is a muscle, where cruelty's humored.
The tooth of moral rectitude's
a fang. What I gave
at the sight of him there
was up. What I got
of humanity there
was the hang . . .
Copyright Credit: Heather McHugh, “The Woman Who Laughed on Calvary” from Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993. Copyright © 1994 by Heather McHugh. Reprinted with the permission of Wesleyan University Press.
Source: Hinge & Sign: Poems 1968-1993 (Wesleyan University Press, 1994)