Heather McHugh
The Matter Over
It is better to say "I am suffering" than to say
"This landscape is ugly." –Simone Weil
From the piling's kelp I drew
the starfish with its five blunt fingers.
First I thought the creature
less than handsome, less of a hand
than I expected, rigid, with a stumpy gray
asymmetry of grasp. It wasn't soft. It hardly moved. So maybe
it was dead? I couldn't see
beyond myself, until I turned
the matter over, and beheld
billions of unfamiliar
facts–minute transparent
footlets, feelers, stems
all waving to the quick, and then
the five large radials beginning
gradually to flail, in my slow sight,
and then, in my thin air,
to drown. I'd meant
to send it, as a gift, to you
who were my missing part,
so far inland. Instead
to a world the sighted have no rights to,
to the dark that's out of mind,
I made myself resign it,
flinging the hand from my hand.
Heather McHugh, Hinge & Sign: Poems, 1968-1993, Wesleyan
University Press, 1994.