Sweet Ruin I Hear You

"Sweet Ruin" by Tony Hoagland is one of my favorite poems, and books. The images in it are beautiful, they may seem a little disjointed or random but that is the way that a Hoagland poem is, it is not all wrapped up in a neat little bow for you. My love of this poem is not to say that I feel I need to "ruin" my life as in take it down because it is terrible. I am not leaving for another country because it is so terrible here. I have to leave because I have nothing else to gain by staying. Life is not happening to me here. I can not sit around and wait for someone to love who will love me back or to learn I am a knitting prodigy and do the talk show circuit. I crave a place where greeting someone or making breakfast become conflicts because they are so different. It is not really sweet ruin that I am after, but what comes after, when my entire life up to now becomes a backdrop for sweet rebuilding of the 208 bones in my body. I crave sweet renewal of the my 5 senses, sweet regeneration of everything I have ever know to be true, to remember everything I know by forgetting it and learning it again with in new borders. I march into what Hemingway called "the undiscovered country." I am going to the woods to live deliberately and hitting every key on the piano to hear where there is dissonance and any other famous or made up metaphor that I can conjure up so my gut, my heart and my head will know that maybe I am running full speed into the arms of another imperfection, but I am running toward experience. Sweet Ruin I hear you.

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 whisky 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 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 loses 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 exactly 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.
Life 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.