by vera city on February 18th, 2009

vera city

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What do you think of this poem?

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  • by vera city on February 18th, 2009

    vera city

    The History of Desire by Tony Hoagland

    When you're seventeen, and drunk
    on the husky, late-night flavor
    of your first girlfriend's voice
    along the wires of the telephone

    what else to do but steal
    your father's El Dorado from the drive,
    and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
    Then climb the county water tower

    and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
    a hundred feet above the town?
    Because only the letters of that word,
    DORIS, next door to yours,

    in yard-high, iridescent script,
    are amplified enough to tell the world
    who's playing lead guitar
    in the rock band of your blood.

    You don't consider for a moment
    the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
    a decade after Doris, when,
    out for a drive on your visit home,

    you take the Smallville Road, look up
    and see RON LOVES DORIS
    still scorched upon the reservoir.
    This is how history catches up—

    by holding still until you
    bump into yourself.
    What makes you blush, and shove
    the pedal of the Mustang

    almost through the floor
    as if you wanted to spray gravel
    across the features of the past,
    or accelerate into oblivion?

    Are you so out of love that you
    can't move fast enough away?
    But if desire is acceleration,
    experience is circular as any

    Indianapolis. We keep coming back
    to what we are—each time older,
    more freaked out, or less afraid.
    And you are older now.

    You should stop today.
    In the name of Doris, stop.

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  • by friday1322 on May 13th, 2009

    friday1322

    great!!

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