Sweet Ruin

by Tony Hoagland

Maybe that is what he was after,
my father, when he arranged, ten years ago
to be discovered in a mobile home
with a woman named Roxanne, an attractive,
recently divorced masseuse.


He sat there, he said later, in the middle
of a red imitation-leather sofa,
with his shoes off and a whiskey in his hand,
filling up with a joyful kind of dread-
like a swamp filling up with night,


-while my mother hammered on the trailer door
with a muddy, pried up stone,
then smashed the headlights of his car,
drove home,
and locked herself inside.


He paid the piper, was how he put it,
because he wanted to live,
and at the time knew no other way
than to behave like some blind and willful beast,
-to make a huge mistake, like a big leap


into space, as if following
a music that required dissonance
and a plunge into the dark.
That is what he tried to tell me,
the afternoon we talked,
as he reclined in his black chair,
divorced from the people in his story
by ten years and a heavy cloud of smoke.
Trying to explain how a man could come
to a place where he has nothing else to gain
unless he losses everything. So he
louses up his work, his love, his own heart.
He hails disaster like a cab. And years later,
when the storm has descended
and rubbed his face in the mud of himself,


he stands again and looks around,
strangely thankful just to be alive,
oddly jubilant- as if he had been granted
the answer to his riddle,
or as if the question


had been taken back. Perhaps
a wind is freshening the grass,
and he can see now, as for the first time,
the softness of the air between the blades. The pleasure
built into a single bending leaf.


Maybe then he calls it, in a low voice
and only to himself, Sweet Ruin.
And maybe only because I am his son,
I can hear just what he means. How
even at this moment, even when the world


seems so perfectly arranged, I feel
a force prepared to take it back.
Like a smudge on the horizon. Like a black spot
on the heart. How one day soon,
I might take this nervous paradise,
bone and muscle of this extraordinary life,
and with one deliberate gesture,
like a man stepping on a stick,
break it into halves. But less gracefully


than that. I think there must be something wrong
with me, or wrong with strength, that I would
break my happiness apart
simply for the pleasure of the sound.
The sound the pieces make. What is wrong


with peace? I couldn't say.
But, sweet ruin, I can hear you.
There is always the desire.
Always the cloud, suddenly present
and willing to oblige.

Sundays, Pipes, and Baseball

On a Sunday like today when the blue sky is lit by a gentle sun. When I'm outside with my shirt off mowing the lawn while my chickens and ducks follow behind burying their beaks and bills into the clippings. I think back to when I was a teenager in California. Full with rage and envy that my stepfather would make me stay home every weekend to mow and trim and sweep and anything else he could think of to keep me exhausted, safe at home and out of trouble.


I think about how I'd sneak inside through the back door every hour or so just to feel the air conditioning and grab some water. Lingering by the kitchen faucet quietly, trying to seem occupied while secretly watching as he sat, slumped in his 60's in that black leather chair. Meticulously cleaning each of his 14 pipes while straining to hear the Padres play on a beaten television across our family room.


And maybe because I'm older now with my own home or maybe because I slept in today with the windows open. Or maybe just because I had a nice quiet dinner last night in my garden... whatever reason; I find myself wishing I still knew that old man.


I wouldn't mind finishing up out here in the yard then joining him inside just to hear him mutter curses into his scotch as another pipe gets pulled apart and I stand in the kitchen, sharing the last couple innings.

Strange Wind

“If the wind had been blowing the Devil this way, the Midnight could scarcely have grown more unholy.”  –Owen Meredith

Haven’t been talking to God much lately; mostly just watching and listening. Haven’t been writing much lately either. Back about 15 years ago I performed with a poet who later asked me what I thought of his work. In honesty I said, “You’re probably one of the best poetic writers I’ve ever met but your work is awful. You have all the words but nothing to say. You need to get out from your papers and live, fall in love with a tramp, split your head open, get some plot to your feelings." So that’s where I’ve been.

When I suddenly knew Christ I was there on the mountaintop but as we came down to the crowd of people I soon understood what it meant when scriptures says, "The Disciples kept to themselves and did not tell anyone at that time what they had seen" -Luke 9:36

Immediately, I was surrounded by believers who began to size me up and down like two-bit tailors ready to put me in a cheap suit. And as I looked around in my new church and my new circle of Christian friends I noticed they were all wearing the same ill fitted suits themselves. They all had this sort of clumsy religiosity with moral suggestions and behaviorism's that really reminded me of oppressed citizens in an occupied village.

Well I winced and jerked back. Not in faith but in action. Who are these shut-in’s and why are they treating me like this?, I thought to myself. I began hearing terms like, “We believers” and “Us” and "Them (non-believers)". It bothered me.

I just don’t think that an all loving God who created everyone would be passing out membership cards to us and not others. I have questions. Mature questions like, “Knowing that God reached out to me exactly the way I needed to be reached, wouldn't he also be willing to reach out to all creation in exactly the manner they need? Is that why we have so many religions? And, Isn’t God just as much in the bars and the parks and gyms on Sunday as he is in a Church? So why are these church folk criticizing their brothers in bars, parks and gyms? Why are they shunning others who pray to God under a different denomination? So after falling asleep a few times during the sermons in a sun vacant church and a few minor outbursts of my own I left and headed home for the remainder of my Sundays.

Then suddenly I was out. I was no longer being treated like the newest member to the Kappa Kappa Christo. Now I was an adulterer of the faith. And I won’t drag on with the emails, instant messages and texts I’ve received but I will include a few of the terms that were sent my way… “Self-Centered, Vain, Arrogant, Uncensored, Non-Biblical, (and my personal favorite) Someone who feels he doesn't need us anymore.” When did I need the crowd at the base of the mountain? Are they my Christ? Did Christ leave me in their protective care? No, my Christ is with me. Not because I’ve earned his fellowship but because he is with us all.

So I’ll keep this letter short. I’m not real happy with Christians right now. My faith in God is solid because the Lord has chosen to make it so. My faith in his children however (me included) is shaky at best.

Alright, a little Bob then I'm off to bed..