Om jou Novembers te oorleef
Ek het so ‘n paar dae gelede my lot hier bekla; ‘n besige, besige November. En toe lees ek vanoggend hierdie pragtige gedig van Tony Hoagland.
Reasons to Survive November
by Tony Hoagland
November like a train wreck –
as if a locomotive made of cold
had hurtled out of Canada
and crashed into a million trees,
flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire.
The sky is a thick, cold gauze –
but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown,
and the Jack Parsons show is up at the museum,
full of luminous red barns.
– Or maybe I’ll visit beautiful Donna,
the kickboxing queen from Santa Fe,
and roll around in her foldout bed.
I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself
with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.
But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,
and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over
and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies.
Desmond -
Hier’s nog iets om jou op te kikker:
Why the Young Men Are So Ugly
Tony Hoagland
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.
Liewe hemel, wat ‘n digter! Ek ken Tony Hoagland hoegenaamd nie. Op ‘n manier herinner dit aan Billy Collins, maar tog ook heeltemal anders. Sterker; bedoelende meer aggressief-sinies? Vertel ‘n bietjie meer?
Johann, dankie; daardie een het ek nog nie gelees nie.
Louis, ek ken hom nie baie goed nie. Hy is natuurlik Amerikaans en daar is redelik onlangs ‘n versamelbundel van hom gepubliseer. Bestel! Ek het so 20 van sy gedigte op my rekenaar, wat ek van onderskeidelik Loftus en Danie Marais gekry het. Hulle is albei groot aanhangers van Hoagland, en ek is maar net te bly hulle het gedeel!
Hier is ‘n baie onlangse een van hom, so twee maande terug gepubliseer. Dit is ‘n hartbreker…
Personal
by Tony Hoagland
Don’t take it personal, they said;
but I did, I took it all quite personal—
the breeze and the river and the color of the fields;
the price of grapefruit and stamps,
the wet hair of women in the rain—
And I cursed what hurt me
and I praised what gave me joy,
the most simple-minded of possible responses.
The government reminded me of my father,
with its deafness and its laws,
and the weather reminded me of my mom,
with her tropical squalls.
Enjoy it while you can, they said of Happiness
Think first, they said of Talk
Get over it, they said
at the School of Broken Hearts
but I couldn’t and I didn’t and I don’t
believe in the clean break;
I believe in the compound fracture
served with a sauce of dirty regret,
I believe in saying it all
and taking it all back
and saying it again for good measure
while the air fills up with I’m-Sorries
like wheeling birds
and the trees look seasick in the wind.
Oh life! Can you blame me
for making a scene?
You were that yellow caboose, the moon
disappearing over a ridge of cloud.
I was the dog, chained in some fool’s backyard;
barking and barking:
trying to convince everything else
to take it personal too.
Dickhead
Tony Hoagland
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.
Goed, nou stop ek!!
Grammar
Tony Hoagland
Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend,
smiles like a big cat and says
that she’s a conjugated verb.
She’s been doing the direct object
with a second person pronoun named Phil,
and when she walks into the room,
everybody turns:
some kind of light is coming from her head.
Even the geraniums look curious,
and the bees, if they were here, would buzz
suspiciously around her hair, looking
for the door in her corona.
We’re all attracted to the perfume
of fermenting joy,
we’ve all tried to start a fire,
and one day maybe it will blaze up on its own.
In the meantime, she is the one today among us
most able to bear the idea of her own beauty,
and when we see it, what we do is natural:
we take our burned hands
out of our pockets,
and clap.
Food for thought… vir dié wat maklik uitsprake maak …
Lawrence
Tony Hoagland
On two occasions in the past twelve months
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D. H. Lawrence,
a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
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 ovum of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name
the way 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.