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.