Poetry  December 2009 | issue 408

Selected Poems

by Tony Hoagland

TONY HOAGLAND’s newest book of poetry is Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. He recently taught at the 2011 Conference on the Great Mother and New Father, where he was overstimulated by the company of talented artists and musicians and found serious cultural debate of the kind he’d once hoped to find within the walls of American universities. He lives in Houston, Texas.

A History of High Heels

 

It’s like God leaned down long ago and said,
to a woman who was just standing around,
“How would you like a pair of shoes
that shoves the backs of your feet up about four inches
so you balance always on your tiptoes

and your spine roller-coasters forward, then back,
so that even when you are spin-doctoring a corporate merger
or returning from your father’s funeral in Florida,
your rump sticks out in a fertility announcement

and your chest is pushed out a little bit in front of you,
the way that majorettes precede a marching band?”

No, I shouldn’t have said that — I’m sorry.
It’s just my curdled bitterness talking;
it’s just my disappointment flaring up
                                           in a little brush fire of misogyny,
in a toxic chemical blaze of misdirected scorn —

because today is one of those days when I am starting to suspect
that sex was just a wild-goose chase
in which I honk-honk-honked away
                  three-quarters of my sweet, unconscious life.

Now my hair is gray, and I’m in the Philadelphia airport,
where women are still walking past me endlessly
with that clickety-clack, clickety-clack,
flipping their hair and licking their teeth,

while underneath my own shoes
I suddenly can feel the emptiness of space;
and over my head, light falling from the sky
that all these years
I might have been leaning back

to gaze at and long for and praise.

 

 

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