More poetry from Tony Hoagland.<\/p>\n
Maybe I overdid it
\nwhen I called my father an enemy of humanity.
\nThat might have been a little strongly put,
\na slight exaggeration,<\/p>\n
an immoderate description of the person
\nwho at the moment, two thousand miles away,
\nholding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
\nmust have regretted paying for my therapy.<\/p>\n
What I meant was that my father
\nwas an enemy of my humanity
\nand what I meant behind that
\nwas that my father was split
\ninto two people, one of them<\/p>\n
living deep inside of me
\nlike a bad king or an incurable disease\u2014
\nblighting my crops,
\nstriking down my herds,
\npoisoning my wells\u2014the other
\nstanding in another time zone,
\nin a kitchen in Wyoming
\nwith bad knees and white hair spouting from his ears.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t want to scream forever,
\nI don\u2019t want to live without proportion
\nLike some kind of infection from the past,<\/p>\n
so I have to remember the second father,
\nthe one whose TV dinner is getting cold
\nwhile he holds the phone in his left hand
\nand stares blankly out the window<\/p>\n
where just now the sun is going down
\nand the last fingertips of sunlight
\nare withdrawing from the hills
\nthey once touched like a child.<\/p>\n
~ from What Narcissism Means To Me (Greywolf Press, 2003)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
More poetry from Tony Hoagland. Maybe I overdid it when I called my father an enemy of humanity. That might have been a little strongly put, a slight exaggeration, an immoderate description of the person who at the moment, two thousand miles away, holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear, must have regretted […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-314","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=314"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/314\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=314"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=314"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=314"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}