Tony Hoagland

Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish and old space suits with skeletons inside. On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life out of the box, uncapping the bottle to let the effervescence gush through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances in unison, and then the fireflies flash dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet we once came from, to which we will never be permitted to return. We are amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean. And the day I quit the job my father got me. And the day I stood outside a door, and listened to my girlfriend making love to someone obviously not me, inside, and I felt strange because I didn’t care. There was the morning I was born, and the year I was a loser, and the night I was the winner of the prize for which the audience applauded. Then there was someone else I met, whose face and voice I can’t forget, and the memory of her is like a jail I’m trapped inside, or maybe she is something I just use to hold my real life at a distance. Happiness, Joe says,is a wild red flower plucked from a river of lava and held aloft on a tightrope strung between two scrawny trees above a canyon in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Cold wind comes out of the white hills and rubs itself against the walls of the condominium with an esophogeal vowel sound, and a loneliness creeps into the conversation by the hot tub. We don’t deserve pleasure just as we don’t deserve pain, but it’s pure sorcery the way the feathers of warm mist keep rising from the surface of the water to wrap themselves around a sculpted clavicle or wrist. It’s not just that we are on the eighth story of the world looking out through glass and steel with a clarity of vision in which imported coffee and a knowledge of French painting are combined, but that we are atop a pyramid of all the facts that make this possible: the furnace that heats the water, the truck that hauled the fuel, the artery of highway blasted through the mountains, the heart attack of the previous owner, the history of Western medicine that failed to save him, the successful development of tourism, the snow white lotions that counteract the chemistry of chlorine upon skin—our skin. Down inside history’s body, the slaves are still singing in the dark; the roads continue to be built; the wind blows and the building grips itself in anticipation of the next strong gust. So an enormous act of forgetting is required simply to kiss someone or to open your mouth for the fork of high-calorie paté someone is raising to your lips, which, considering the price, it would be a sin not to enjoy.

We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me that she screams underwater when she swims— that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool where she does laps every other day. Buttering her toast, not as if she had been concealing anything, not as if I should consider myself personally the cause of her screaming, nor as if we should perform an act of therapy right that minute on the kitchen table, —casually, she told me, and I could see her turn her square face up to take a gulp of oxygen, then down again into the cold wet mask of the unconscious. For all I know, maybe everyone is screaming as they go through life, silently, politely keeping the big secret that it is not all fun to be ripped by the crooked beak of something called psychology, to be dipped down again and again into time; that the truest, most intimate pleasure you can sometimes find is the wet kiss of your own pain. There goes Kath, at one pm , to swim her twenty-two laps back and forth in the community pool; —what discipline she has! Twenty-two laps like twenty-two pages, that will never be read by anyone.

Windy today and I feel less than brilliant, driving over the hills from work. There are the dark parts on the road when you pass through clumps of wood and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean, but that doesn’t make the road an allegory. I should call Marie and apologize for being so boring at dinner last night, but can I really promise not to be that way again? And anyway, I’d rather watch the trees, tossing in what certainly looks like sexual arousal. Otherwise it’s spring, and everything looks frail; the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves are full of infant chlorophyll, the very tint of inexperience. Last summer’s song is making a comeback on the radio, and on the highway overpass, the only metaphysical vandal in America has written MEMORY LOVES TIME in big black spraypaint letters, which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back. Last night I dreamed of X again. She’s like a stain on my subconscious sheets. Years ago she penetrated me but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, I never got her out, but now I’m glad. What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky. Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It’s been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more.

Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find people who would love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people? In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate if your hand gets trapped in the gears of the machine; if you acted fast, she said, you could save everything above the wrist. You want to keep a really sharp blade close by, she said. Now I raise that hand to scratch one of those nasty little scabs on the back of my head, and we sit outside and watch the sun go down, inflamed as an appendicitis over western Illinois — which then subsides and cools into a smooth gray sea. Who knows, this might be the last good night of summer. My broken nose is forming an idea of what’s for supper. Hard to believe that death is just around the corner. What kind of idiot would think he even had a destiny? I was on the road for so long by myself, I took to reading motel Bibles just for company. Lying on the chintz bedspread before going to sleep, still feeling the motion of the car inside my body, I thought some wrongness in my self had made me that alone. And God said,You are worth more to me than one hundred sparrows.

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.

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear, there are some

When a beautiful woman wakes up, she checks to see if her beauty is still there. When a sick person wakes up, he checks to see if he continues to be sick. He takes the first pills in a thirty-pill day, looks out the window at a sky where a time-release sun is crawling through the milky X ray of a cloud. * * * * * I sing the body like a burnt-out fuse box, the wires crossed, the panel lit by red malfunction lights, the pistons firing out of sequence, the warning sirens blatting in the empty halls, and the hero is trapped in a traffic jam, the message doesn’t reach its destination, the angel falls down into the body of a dog and is speechless, tearing at itself with fast white teeth; and the consciousness twists evasively, like a sheet of paper, traveled by blue tongues of flame. * * * * * In the famous painting, the saint looks steadfastly heavenward, away from the physical indignity below, the fascinating spectacle of his own body bristling with arrows; he looks up as if he were already adamantly elsewhere, exerting that power of denial the soul is famous for, that ability to say, “None of this is real: Nothing that happened here on earth and who I thought I was, and nothing that I did or that was done to me, was ever real.”

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 was 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?