These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder
to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ova of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name
the way that pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
‘O Elephant,’ they say,
‘you are not so big and brave today!’
It’s a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven’t earned,
and it’s a sorry thing when certain other people
don’t defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,
I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, ‘I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse,’
or, ‘You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life
as to deserve to lift
just one of D.H. Lawrence’s urine samples
to your arid psychobiographic
theory-tainted lips.’
Or maybe I’ll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven’t come that far
in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more
than fight, and fuck, and crow:
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.
*
Lucky
If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to help your enemy
the way I got to help my mother
when she was weakened past the point of saying no.
Into the big enamel tub
half-filled with water
which I had made just right,
I lowered the childish skeleton
she had become.
Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed
her belly and her chest,
the sorry ruin of her flanks
and the frayed gray cloud
between her legs.
Some nights, sitting by her bed
book open in my lap
while I listened to the air
move thickly in and out of her dark lungs,
my mind filled up with praise
as lush as music,
amazed at the symmetry and luck
that would offer me the chance to pay
my heavy debt of punishment and love
with love and punishment.
And once I held her dripping wet
in the uncomfortable air
between the wheelchair and the tub,
until she begged me like a child
to stop,
an act of cruelty which we both understood
was the ancient irresistible rejoicing
of power over weakness.
If you are lucky in this life,
you will get to raise the spoon
of pristine, frosty ice cream
to the trusting creature mouth
of your old enemy
because the tastebuds at least are not broken
because there is a bond between you
and sweet is sweet in any language.
Related Reviews
'Tony Hoagland’s high zaniness always makes us laugh, but his real substance issues from the personal, aesthetic and moral risks he invokes in poem after poem… What Narcissism Means to Me shows us our age and how great poetry is still possible' – Rodney Jones
'A Late Night Show of poetry hosted by a high priest of irony (check out the title)… These poems are very funny, but they are also sad, sharp-edged and ambitious… confiding, consistently irreverent and, in a way, comforting' – Carol Muske-Dukes, Los Angeles Times
'Hoagland's central subject is the self, specifically, a prickly, grandiose American masculine poetic self, or to be more specific still, what the author ruefully labels in one poem "a government called Tony Hoagland"…there is something refreshing about his willingness to expose his crummier impulses' – Emily Nussbaum, New York Times
'It's hard to imagine any aspect of contemporary American life that couldn't make its way into the writing of Tony Hoagland or a word in common or formal usage he would shy away from. He is a poet of risk: he risks wild laughter in poems that are totally heartfelt, poems you want to read out loud to anyone who needs to know the score and even more so to those who think they know the score. The framework of his writing is immense, almost as large as the tarnished nation he wandered into under the star of poetry' – Jackson Poetry Prize judges' citation
