Proud - Tony Hoagland

[Larry Robinson]

Proud

Like those crazy Babylonians, who raised a tower
higher than their own I.Q.; so gigantic,
it could only have been built by God —
a fact that they forgot, until they fell,
in argument, apart, like so many unmortared
parts of speech. Babylon, remember?
They fell, and we grew up
to learn two languages — one for money,
and one for love; one for saying what we mean,
and one for hiding it. I'm thinking of my brother,
who lost his voice, and then his wife
because he was too proud to say, "Please, Don't Go."
That architect, my brother,
who sleeps now on his office couch,
twitching like a racedog in a business suit,
a dog who dreams he is so far ahead of all
the competition, he'll be impossible to catch.
I'm speaking of my brother, but I might as well
be talking of my enormously rich and arrogant
other relative, the United States — a country so goliath,
it casts a shadow over half the world;
so ambidextrous, it can lie and listen to itself
at once. And isn't that the story of the mind?
Which started as a little church,
with open doors,
but wound up as a fortress, with foot-thick walls
and a bristling defense. Somewhere inside,
we are lost, muttering about our enemies
and making up the truth. Truth is,
the self is a disease, a wound
which grows infected with the fear
that it will never have enough.
And egomania
is standing on a mountaintop
and sucking down great lungfuls
of a better quality of air
than what the common people get; it feels
like freedom and it tastes like truth;
you laugh, and every forty seconds, pledge
a new allegiance to yourself. And maybe
we will have to go on climbing to some
hopeless height, to some fantastic speed,
like Icarus the biggest day of his career.
Maybe there are pinnacles of ignorance,
altitudes of stupid, from which
recovery is impossible. I think
of my brother, who might have saved himself
with just a single word, however late and lame.
I think of my country,
which goes on talking.

	- Tony Hoagland
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