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The Retort Room

By Heather McHughUpdated Wednesday, Oct. 27, 1999, at 3:30 AM ET

Abandoned, it had tottered for years
on the water's lip, or lap. Squatter-pigeons
occupied its nights, dreaming of drowning in glottals.

Then suddenly some trucks arrived
and hauled away enormous rusted remnants
of the cannery's cookery. Inside a week,

the great stained concrete that had poured down
fifty years and twenty feet into the tide
was sheathed in plywood trundled from

a local lumberyard. The whole place bloomed
with polyester greenery and sky-blue styrofoam.
And sure enough, from somewhere south,

with a flourish of romance, and a big RV,
he brought his wife of decades here to live
in dreamland--at the dead end of the island's

eastmost street, where he would twinkle,
she abide. The new red retort room
now bore his greatest masterwork:

nailed near the Wal-Mart welcome sign, a homemade
six-foot jigged-out replica of trawler, painted up
as jaunty as you like, the city-cousin of the working ones

that trudged the fishless fathoms on the house's darker side.
It was his bid at immortality: we liked him more, the more
he tried. He beamed past every tiredness of a day (retired

by choice!), past eking out, past aching in. He shone
like someone past the past, with whom resides
what conquers all. And then she died.

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Heather McHugh is Milliman Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at the University of Washington in Seattle. Her most recent collection of poems is The Father of the Predicaments; her essays (Broken English: Poetry and Partiality) are being reissued this year.
Click here to visit Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project site.
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