Proud -Tony Hoagland

[Lawrence 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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