On the Fourth Day

Heather McHugh

For Richard Hladky

Suddenly everything
Stayed the same.We who had called
The water blueRefocused on our lenses.
We who had seen the island moveReunderstood our oars.  The sand
Composed some drumlins in the soundWhile we revised the sky.  And whether we felt fog or not,
The sun still burned alive.  Arose, along the tidelines,Ever un-updated news.  (Some news was not
Of men.)  A day and a night were number fiveAnd suddenly nothing changed again.

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Heather McHugh lives on the Olympic Peninsula. She taught at the University of Washington for thirty years, and continues to take students occasionally through the MFA program at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, North Carolina.

The Sewanee Review

Spring 2018

Sewanee, Tennessee

University of the South

Editor
Adam Ross

Managing Editor & Poetry Editor
Eric Smith

Assistant Editors
Hellen Wainaina
Jennie Vite

Founded in 1892 by the teacher and critic William Peterfield Trent, the Sewanee Review is the longest-running literary quarterly in America. The SR has published many of the twentieth century’s great writers, including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Wallace Stevens, Saul Bellow, Katherine Anne Porter, Marianne Moore, Seamus Heaney, Hannah Arendt, and Ezra Pound. The Review has a long tradition of cultivating emerging talent, from excerpts of Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor’s first novels to the early poetry of Robert Penn Warren, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and Christian Wiman. “Whatever the new literature turns out to be,” wrote editor Allen Tate in 1944, “ it will be the privilege of the Sewanee Review to print its share of it, to comment on it, and to try to understand it.” The mission remains unchanged.

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