Jill Allyn Rosser presents a poem by Tony Hoagland
Today’s offering is perhaps not the usual Hallmark take on Father’s Day, okay. Tony Hoagland as usual slashes right through convention with the straight razor he keeps in his back pocket even when he’s sleeping. This poem rides on a wave of brutal honesty that is riveting, disturbing, and perversely satisfying, the way the person at the funeral who stands up and tells an unflattering anecdote about the deceased is the only one who makes you finally break down and weep. I have admired Tony Hoagland’s work since I first encountered it for his absolute, Lawrentian insistence on candor at all costs. Hoagland’s voice characteristically plunges and swerves through the rapids of our culture’s amorality, all the while “simply” telling you about something that happened to him one day. His is a crafted and deeply thoughtful recklessness. Which sounds contradictory until you read, for example, this poem, which first appeared in New Ohio Review 5, Spring 2009.
My Father Tells Me A Story
I had heard that one before, several times
over the years–how some wealthy couple in El Paso
hired a woman from over the border
then kept her hostage for seven years
by filling her brown head with the whispered menace of la migra—
–And with that gringo cunning and common human greed
they kept themselves a slave for minimum wage.
But when my father tells me the story, the name of the housekeeper
turns out to be Rosalina,
and the rich bastards in El Paso turn out to be Dave and Beth,
old family friends of ours–
and he still remembers the amazing enchiladas on Friday nights
she would bring in on a big white plate.
A cloud slides over the sun, and I can see
the scabs and lesions on my father’s scalp, the pink square shaped like Kansas
where the skin graft struggles like a crop to take;
I can see the slight tremble in the hand that holds his drink,
where the melting cubes are watering the Scotch.
Why does he bring up the story of the Mexican housekeeper?
and why does he tell it with a smile on his face,
like a naughty joke he is ashamed of liking,
but likes too much to keep it to himself?
Maybe for my father it is a story about how ignorant
a human being can be–how frightened and cheap, how easy to deceive,
maybe for him it is a story of how some people
are just destined to be used by others,
and how it is better not to be those people–
maybe he wants to teach me that again.
Or maybe he wants to get under my skin, to rile me up,
or make me ashamed of listening,
maybe he is giving me the story like a little cup of bile
to watch me struggle with the taste,
to see if I will spit it out and make a scene
or bend the knee to him and gulp it down.
I sit there in my chair, sunk in fume and funk
and think of that village in the Bible
which flushed its waste into the river
to be rid of it, not imagining
the next village downstream
which would drink the sewage of the first,
and isn’t that the situation? the taste of history
unexpectedly rushing into this present moment
to pollute and complicate the sunlight of my dad’s backyard,
where the drinks are on the table
and the little wooden bowl
of goldfish crackers waits?
And here I grow suspicious that the story of the Mexican housekeeper
is somehow about me–
someone terrified of life,
willing to take what I am given
in exchange for being safe, in my little room just off the kitchen,
with my ironing board and black-and-white tv.
Or maybe my father now is just a country in decline,
a captain on his sinking ship, tilting and submerging,
going down as memories drift up through his brain
like bubbles of exhausted oxygen, delirious,
escaping from his state rooms and his bilge,
a multitude of stories all rising up in no particular order,
maybe the story of the Mexican housekeeper is just one of those?
But here she is, suddenly in front of us–
her bown face wrinkled after years immersed inside my father’s mind,
it’s Rosalina,
wearing a dusty apron, holding a rolling pin in her hand.
And she’s tired, and scared, and she’s also mad as hell,
not at my dad, but me–yelling
that she doesn’t want to be in this poem for one more minute,
and she’s leaning right up into my face,
spraying spit and broken English,
saying that I don’t know nothing, nothing about her–
yelling that she wants to go back where she came from,
Please, Señor, she wants to go back NOW!
– – – – – – – –
Tony Hoagland is a poet who — well, if you don’t already know, just google the guy. Till next week, keep the mojitos cold, the glasses frosted. (JAR)
From the archive; first posted June 17, 20212
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Author: The Best American Poetry
