Poems by Tony Hoagland
Adam and Eve
I wanted to punch her right in the mouth and that's the truth.
After all, we had gotten from the station of the flickering glances
to the station of the hungry mouths,
from the shoreline of skirts and faded jeans
to the ocean of unencumbered skin,
from the perilous mountaintop of the apartment steps
to the sanctified valley of the bed--
the candle fluttering upon the dresser top, its little yellow blade
sending up its whiff of waxy smoke,
and I could smell her readiness
like a dank cloud above a field,
when at the crucial moment, the all-important moment,
the moment standing at attention,
she held her milk white hand agitatedly
over the entrance to her body and said No,
and my brain burst into flame.
If I couldn't sink myself in her like a dark spur
or dissolve into her like a clod thrown in a river,
can I go all the way in the saying, and say
I wanted to punch her right in the face?
Am I allowed to say that,
that I wanted to punch her right in her soft face?
Or is the saying just another instance of rapaciousness,
just another way of doing what I wanted then,
by saying it?
Is a man just an animal, and is a woman not an animal?
Is the name of the animal power?
Is it true that the man wishes to see the woman
hurt with her own pleasure
and the woman wishes to see the expression on the man's face
of someone falling from great height,
that the woman thrills with the power of her weakness
and the man is astonished by the weakness of his power?
Is the sexual chase a hunt where the animal inside
drags the human down
into a jungle made of vowels,
hormonal undergrowth of sweat and hair,
or is this an obsolete idea
lodged like a fossil
in the brain of the ape
who lives inside the man?
Can the fossil be surgically removed
or dissolved, or redesigned
so the man can be a human being, like a woman?
Does the woman see the man as a house
where she might live in safety,
and does the man see the woman as a door
through which he might escape
the hated prison of himself,
and when the door is locked,
does he hate the door instead?
Does he learn to hate all doors?
I've seen rain turn into snow then back to rain,
and I've seen making love turn into fucking
then back to making love,
and no one covered up their faces out of shame,
no one rose and walked into the lonely maw of night.
But where was there, in fact, to go?
Are some things better left unsaid?
Shall I tell you her name?
Can I say it again,
that I wanted to punch her right in the face?
Until we say the truth, there can be no tenderness.
As long as there is desire, we will not be safe.
America
Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison
Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can't tell the show from the commercials,
And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he's driving to the mall in his Isuzu
Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels
Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America
And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,
And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money
That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,
He gasped, "Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—
And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty"—
Which is when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,
And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, "I am asleep in America too,
And I don't know how to wake myself either,"
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:
"I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future."
But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be
When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river
Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters
And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?
Texaco
The nozzle of the gas pump
plunged into the flank of the car
like the curved beak of a predatory bird
looks like it is drinking
or maybe I'm light-headed
from the fumes
or from the slanted light
of Thursday afternoon.
—Still, it is a powerful moment
when I squeeze the trigger of the handle
and feel, beneath the stained cement,
the deep shudder and convulsion
of the gasoline begin
its plunging rush in my direction.
Out of the guts of the earth,
filtered through sand and blood
down the long hose of history
towards the very nipple of this moment:
—the mechanical ticking of the pump,
the sound of my car drinking—
filling my tank with a necessary story
about the road, how we have
to have it to go down;
the whole world construed around
this singular, solitary act
as if I myself had conjured it
from some strange thirst.
Dickhead
To whomever taught
me the word dickhead,
I owe a debt of
thanks.
It gave me a way of
being in the world of men
when I most needed
one,
when I was pale and
scrawny,
naked, goosefleshed
as a plucked
chicken
in a supermarket
cooler, a poor
forked thing
stranded in the savage
universe of
puberty, where wild
jockstraps flew
across the steamy
skies of locker
rooms,
and everybody fell
down laughing
at jokes I didn’t
understand.
But dickhead was a word as dumb
and democratic as a
hammer, an object
you could pick up
in your hand,
and swing,
saying dickhead this and dickhead that,
a song that meant
the world
was yours enough at
least
to bang on like a
garbage can,
and knowing it, and
having that
beautiful ugliness
always
cocked and loaded
in my mind,
protected me and
calmed me like a psalm.
Now I have myself
become
a beautiful
ugliness,
and my weakness is
a fact
so well established
that
it makes me calm,
and I am calm
enough
to be grateful for
the lives I
never have to live
again;
but I remember all
the bad old days
back in the world
of men,
when everything was
serious, mysterious, scary,
hairier and bigger
than I was;
I recall
when flesh
was what I hated,
feared
and was excluded
from:
Hardly knowing what
I did,
or what would come
of it,
I made a word my
friend.
The Replacement
And across the country I know
they are replacing
my brother's brain
with the brain
of a man;
one gesture, one word, one neuron at a time
with surgical
precision
they are teaching
him to hook his thumbs
into his belt,
to iron his mouth as flat
as the horizon,
and make his eyes
reflective
as a piece of tin.
It is a kind of cooking
the male child
undergoes:
to toughen
him, he is dipped repeatedly
in insult--peckerwood,
shitbag, faggot,
pussy,
dicksucker--until spear points
will break
against his epidermis,
until his is
impossible to disappoint.
Then he walks out into the street
ready for a
game of corporate poker
with a hard-on
for the Dow-Jones
like this hormonal
language I am
flexing like
a bicep
to show who's
boss.
But I'm not the boss.
And there is
nothing I can do to stop it,
and would I
if I could?
What else is
there for him to be
except a man?
If they fail,
he stumbles
through his life
like an untied
shoe.
If they succeed,
he may become
something even
I can't love.
Already the photograph I have of him
is out of date
but in it he
is standing by the pool
without a shirt:
too young, too white, too weak,
with feelings
he is too inept to hide
splashed over
his face--
goofy, proud, shy,
he's smiling
at the camera
as if he were
under the illusion
that someone
loved him so well
they would
not ever ever ever
turn him over
to the world.
Why the Young Men Are So Ugly
They have little tractors in their blood
and all day the tractors climb up and down
inside their arms and legs, their
collarbones and heads.
That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells
down into their clanking slots,
making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron,
like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains.
That is why they shriek their tires at the stopsign,
why they turn the base up on the stereo
until it shakes the traffic light, until it
dryhumps the eardrum of the crossing guard.
Testosterone is a drug,
and they say No, No, No until
they are overwhelmed and punch
their buddy in the face for joy,
or make a joke about gravy and bottomless holes
to a middle-aged waitress who is gently
setting down the plate in front of them.
If they are grotesque, if
what they say and do is often nothing more
than a kind of psychopathic fart,
it is only because of the tractors,
the tractors in their blood,
revving their engines, chewing up the turf
inside their arteries and veins
It is the testosterone tractor
constantly climbing the mudhill of the world
and dragging the young man behind it
by a chain around his leg.
In the stink and the noise, in the clouds
of filthy exhaust
is where they live. It is the tractors
that make them
what they are. While they make being a man
look like a disease.
Rap
Music
Twenty-six
men trapped in a submarine
are pounding
on the walls with a metal pipe,
shouting what
they'll do when they get out.
Or they are
rolled up in a rug in the back
of a rug truck
that has wrecked.
No, it's the
car pulled up next to mine in traffic
with the windows
rolled down and the sound turned up
so loud it
puts everything in italics: enough to make the asphalt thump
and the little
leaves of shrubbery
in front of
the nice brick houses quake.
I don't know
what's going on inside that portable torture chamber,
but I have
a bad suspicion
there's a lot
of dead white people in there
on a street
lit by burning police cars
where a black
man is striking the head of a white one
again and again
with a brick,
then lifting
the skull to drink blood from the hole—
But that's
what art is for, isn't it?
It's about
giving expression to the indignation—
it's for taking
the in out of the inhibitchin;
so maybe my
ears are just a little hysterical
or maybe my
fear is a little historical
and you know,
I'd like to form an exploratory committee
to investigate
that question—
and I'd like
that committee to produce a documentary
called The
Sweet Sounds of Afro-American,
but all this
ugly noise is getting in the way,
and what I'm
not supposed to say
is that Black
for me is a country
more foreign
than China or Vagina,
more alarming than
going down Niagara on Viagra—
and it makes
me feel stupid when I get close
like a little
white dog on the edge of a big dark woods
I'm not supposed
to look directly into
and there's
this pounding noise
like a heartbeat
full of steroids,
like a thousand
schizophrenic Shakespeares
killing themselves
at high volume—
this tangled
roar
that has to
be shut up or blown away or sealed off
or actually
mentioned and entered.