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Fingers
Because a trooper was down on all fours
at night hunting your finger tips,
because cars were lined up side by side
and a six-wheeler besides, lights on to help,
because cruisers arrived and just plain
ordinary cops who got down and looked,
because the great belt of highway was
closed and the hearts of so many drivers
opened to a teen-age girl and the search
for lost parts, because the trooper
found your forefinger and cried
and someone else your middle finger,
the one that touches everything first,
and then your ring finger, now
more precious than any jewel,
because ice that turns lips blue kept
your fingertips cold while
the lights flashed red and the sirens,
because a nurse put her hand on your
brow and whispered and someone
sewed and another prayed and all
that had been severed was linked:
praise and praise again
the fingers and hands that sifted
the gravel-glass-rubble by the roadside
seeking the lost ones, praise the woman
who held your other hand on the long
ride to the hospital and kept talking,
praise the intern who first lifted
your fingers from the tray and placed them
at the end of your hand and the surgeon
who threaded a needle and joined
nerve to nerve and wound the tendons
under the quiet light of the operating room,
praise the nurse who washed your face
and lay your bandaged hand beside you
and sat with you as you came up
out of anesthesia into recovery,
and praise to you, your terror and rising
again so that someday a girl might become
a woman who will touch a man's breast
and feel his heart beating the way
her own heart beat that night, a mother
will caress the hair of her child
and say to her when things are lost,
how all was lost and found again
because strangers got down on all fours
and picked up pieces of my body.
--Hugh Ogden, Looking For History
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Lecture On The Tides
This is the point when the earth
wobbles and the days lengthen
and the years have to have days
added. The point when the harness
that pulls the sea pulls each
of us into spring and makes us
shudder again when the first
red appears, the bleeding
that quicker than not becomes
green. You will always be here
as long as water cuts deeper
into soil and the coursing
adds to what is left, as long as
leaves are drawn out by the tide
and buds bleed through bark,
even you who are lost will always
be here as long as the moon
circles into its line with sun
and the oceans respond, as long
as we are able to find the moment
when the winds make the globe
waver, as long as the earth
corrects itself, as long as
pain takes faith in its bud
and flowers.
--Hugh Ogden, Two Roads and This Spring
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The Lesson
Miss Thomas had to know, long before she looked
up from her copy of Wordsworth's poems through
the hiss of the radiator at the itching silence
of a twelfth-grade class, that the class would
explode when the bell finally rang and that,
when she looked down at the ankle-high shoes
she had pulled on in the morning, she would
think about the shoes she might have worn if
she hadn't chosen to live in a town where women
made little clicking sounds when she and the woman
she lived with walked by, where the men guffawed
when they passed her house, she had to have
known that, by plodding to the board to crack
the chalk one more time as she spelled out
the dignity of a word before they rushed out,
that teaching Wordsworth was a gift almost
as great as the one she surely didn't know she
had given when, on that clear day in October
of Nineteen Hundred and Fifty Two, she had come
in and, with her hands at her sides, faced
the flag as everyone pledged allegiance to a piece
of cloth and then had asked the hunched-over
kid in the back to read as the day's Bible
lesson Paul's first letter to Corinthians about
how, if we speak with the tongues of men and
angels and have not love, we are a noisy gong
and clanging cymbal, and he had done so and for
the first time actually looked at this woman,
her eyes hard light in a glass of blue, her
gray-brown hair done in a bun with a comb
slipped loosely under, her melon-tan lips he
couldn't follow as she sat behind her desk with
the light melting when she said she'd been absent
because, south of Pyongyang, her brother had
been called to a command bunker from a pocket
of soldiers drying out from wet snow, had remained
there so long he was there when a howitzer
exploded in jagged steel and flame, Miss Thomas
couldn't have known it wouldn't be her words
we would learn from but the way her eyes watered
before her shoulders collapsed, her fingers
gripping a pencil so hard we felt our chairs
tremble and the floor quake, the way she sat
through home room and taught us in her first
class about how Wordsworth's Lucy had died
and was now rolled round with rocks and stones
and trees, calling the lost voice of her
brother and all of us unable to rise at the bell.
--Hugh Ogden, The Gift
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