The Change

Tony Hoagland - 1953-2018

The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine. 
In the park the daffodils came up 
and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade.

Sometimes I think that nothing really changes—

The young girls show the latest crop of tummies, 
        and the new president proves that he's a dummy.

But remember the tennis match we watched that year? 
Right before our eyes

some tough little European blonde 
pitted against that big black girl from Alabama, 
cornrowed hair and Zulu bangles on her arms, 
some outrageous name like Vondella Aphrodite—

We were just walking past the lounge 
     and got sucked in by the screen above the bar, 
and pretty soon 
we started to care about who won,

putting ourselves into each whacked return 
as the volleys went back and forth and back 
like some contest between 
the old world and the new,

and you loved her complicated hair 
and her to-hell-with-everybody stare, 
and I, 
         I couldn't help wanting
the white girl to come out on top, 
because she was one of my kind, my tribe, 
with her pale eyes and thin lips

and because the black girl was so big 
and so black, 
                        so unintimidated,

hitting the ball like she was driving the Emancipation Proclamation 
down Abraham Lincoln's throat, 
like she wasn't asking anyone's permission.

There are moments when history 
passes you so close 
                you can smell its breath, 
you can reach your hand out 
                                    and touch it on its flank,

and I don't watch all that much Masterpiece Theatre, 
but I could feel the end of an era there

in front of those bleachers full of people 
in their Sunday tennis-watching clothes

as that black girl wore down her opponent 
then kicked her ass good 
then thumped her once more for good measure

and stood up on the red clay court 
holding her racket over her head like a guitar.

And the little pink judge 
                          had to climb up on a box 
to put the ribbon on her neck, 
still managing to smile into the camera flash, 
even though everything was changing

and in fact, everything had already changed—

Poof, remember? It was the twentieth century almost gone, 
we were there,

and when we went to put it back where it belonged, 
it was past us 
and we were changed.

Listen to Claudia Rankine respond to Hoagland's poem >

Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish and old space suits with skeletons inside. On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life out of the box, uncapping the bottle to let the effervescence gush through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances in unison, and then the fireflies flash dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet we once came from, to which we will never be permitted to return. We are amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.

If you are lucky in this life, you will get to help your enemy the way I got to help my mother when she was weakened past the point of saying no. Into the big enamel tub half-filled with water which I had made just right, I lowered the childish skeleton she had become. Her eyelids fluttered as I soaped and rinsed her belly and her chest, the sorry ruin of her flanks and the frayed gray cloud between her legs. Some nights, sitting by her bed book open in my lap while I listened to the air move thickly in and out of her dark lungs, my mind filled up with praise as lush as music, amazed at the symmetry and luck that would offer me the chance to pay my heavy debt of punishment and love with love and punishment. And once I held her dripping wet in the uncomfortable air between the wheelchair and the tub, until she begged me like a child to stop, an act of cruelty which we both understood was the ancient irresistible rejoicing of power over weakness. If you are lucky in this life, you will get to raise the spoon of pristine, frosty ice cream to the trusting creature mouth of your old enemy because the tastebuds at least are not broken because there is a bond between you and sweet is sweet in any language.

At this height, Kansas is just a concept, a checkerboard design of wheat and corn no larger than the foldout section of my neighbor's travel magazine. At this stage of the journey I would estimate the distance between myself and my own feelings is roughly the same as the mileage from Seattle to New York, so I can lean back into the upholstered interval between Muzak and lunch, a little bored, a little old and strange. I remember, as a dreamy backyard kind of kid, tilting up my head to watch those planes engrave the sky in lines so steady and so straight they implied the enormous concentration of good men, but now my eyes flicker from the in-flight movie to the stewardess's pantyline, then back into my book, where men throw harpoons at something much bigger and probably better than themselves, wanting to kill it, wanting to see great clouds of blood erupt to prove that they exist. Imagine being born and growing up, rushing through the world for sixty years at unimaginable speeds. Imagine a century like a room so large, a corridor so long you could travel for a lifetime and never find the door, until you had forgotten that such a thing as doors exist. Better to be on board the Pequod, with a mad one-legged captain living for revenge. Better to feel the salt wind spitting in your face, to hold your sharpened weapon high, to see the glisten of the beast beneath the waves. What a relief it would be to hear someone in the crew cry out like a gull, Oh Captain, Captain! Where are we going now?

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The Change

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The Change

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