Candlelight
Crossing the porch in the hazy dusk to worship the moon rising like a yellow filling-station sign on the black horizon, you feel the faint grit of ants beneath your shoes, but keep on walking because in this world you have to decide what you’re willing to kill. Saving your marriage might mean dinner for two by candlelight on steak raised on pasture chopped out of rain forest whose absence might mean an atmospheric thinness fifty years from now above the vulnerable head of your bald grandson on vacation as the cells of his scalp sautéed by solar radiation break down like suspects under questioning. Still you slice the sirloin into pieces and feed each other on silver forks under the approving gaze of a waiter whose purchased attention and French name are a kind of candlelight themselves, while in the background the fingertips of the pianist float over the tusks of the slaughtered elephant without a care, as if the elephant had granted its permission.
Self-Improvement
Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents’ summer home, Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: Use nothing but his tongue tip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until he grew fluent at the nuances of force and latitude. Imagine him at practice every evening, more inspired than he ever was at algebra, beads of sweat sprouting on his brow, thinking, Thirty-seven, thirty-eight, seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind’s eye, the quadratic equation of her climax yield to the logic of his simple math. Maybe he unscrewed the bulb from his apartment ceiling so that passersby would not believe a giant firefly was pulsing its electric abdomen in 13-B. Maybe, as he stood two inches from the wall, in darkness, fogging the old plaster with his breath, he visualized the future as a mansion standing on the shore that he was rowing to with his tongue’s exhausted oar. Of course, the girlfriend dumped him: met someone, après-ski, who, using nothing but his nose, could identify the vintage of a Cabernet. Sometimes we are asked to get good at something we have no talent for, or we excel at something we will never have the opportunity to prove. Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in. The climaxes of suffering are complex, costly, beautiful, but secret. Bruce never played the light switch again. So the avenues we walk down, full of bodies wearing faces, are full of hidden talent: enough to make pianos moan, sidewalks split, streetlights deliriously flicker.
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.
Benevolence
When my father dies and comes back as a dog, I already know what his favorite sound will be: the soft, almost inaudible gasp as the rubber lips of the refrigerator door unstick, followed by that arctic exhalation of cold air; then the cracking of the ice-cube tray above the sink and the quiet ching the cubes make when dropped into a glass. Unable to pronounce the name of his favorite drink, or to express his preference for single malt, he will utter one sharp bark and point the wet black arrow of his nose imperatively up at the bottle on the shelf, then seat himself before me, trembling, expectant, water pouring down the long pink dangle of his tongue as the memory of pleasure from his former life shakes him like a tail. What I’ll remember as I tower over him, holding a dripping, whiskey-flavored cube above his open mouth, relishing the power rushing through my veins the way it rushed through his, what I’ll remember as I stand there is the hundred clever tricks I taught myself to please him, and for how long I mistakenly believed that it was love he held concealed in his closed hand.
Beauty
When the medication she was taking caused tiny vessels in her face to break, leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks, my sister said she knew she would never be beautiful again, After all those years of watching her reflection in the mirror, sucking in her stomach and standing straight, she said it was a relief, being done with beauty, but I could see her pause inside that moment as the knowledge spread across her face with a fine distress, sucking the peach out of her lips, making her cute nose seem, for the first time, a little knobby. I’m probably the only one in the whole world who actually remembers the year in high school she perfected the art of being a dumb blond, spending recess on the breezeway by the physics lab, tossing her hair and laughing that canary trill which was her specialty, while some football player named Johnny with a pained expression in his eyes wrapped his thick finger over and over again in the bedspring of one of those pale curls. Or how she spent the next decade of her life auditioning a series of tall men, looking for just one with the kind of attention span she could count on. Then one day her time of prettiness was over, done, finito, and all those other beautiful women in the magazines and on the streets just kept on being beautiful everywhere you looked, walking in that kind of elegant, disinterested trance in which you sense they always seem to have one hand touching the secret place that keeps their beauty safe, inhaling and exhaling the perfume of it — It was spring. Season when the young buttercups and daisies climb up on the mulched bodies of their forebears to wave their flags in the parade. My sister just stood still for thirty seconds, amazed by what was happening, then shrugged and tossed her shaggy head as if she was throwing something out, something she had carried a long ways, but had no use for anymore, now that it had no use for her. That, too, was beautiful.
The poems on these pages are excerpted from Donkey Gospel, by Tony Hoagland. © 1998 by Tony Hoagland. They appear here by permission of Graywolf Press, St. Paul, Minnesota.
