Hearings: A Selection from Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel (1998)
Autumn, and the trees decide again they don’t
need leaves.
Mothers add more blankets to the bed.
Yellow lights in windows of the junior high
mean that night school is back in session,
tired grown-ups sitting at the plastic desks,
learning to bisect the hypotenuse,
how to say spreadsheet in Japanese.
This week on the televised hearings,
we get to watch our congressmen
nervously pronounce the word homosexual
in public—the committee trying to determine
whether queers are good enough
to pull the triggers
on machines designed to foreclose lives
contrary to the national well-being.
But the congressman can’t
pull the trigger on his own tongue
to fire out the word without
tripping over it—fumbling, stumbling
into the ditch between home and sexual.
You might say his defense industry is troubled,
as if he had a subterranean suspicion
that to say it might mean, just a little,
to become it—
which might be right,
since language uses us
the way that birds use sky,
the way that seeds and viruses
braid themselves into a mammal’s fur
and hitchhike toward the future.
When you say a word,
you enter its vocabulary,
it’s got your home address, your phone number
and weight—it won’t forget,
—the way that parents, who finally
bring themselves to say lesbian,
enter, through that checkpoint,
the country where their daughter lives.
Tonight, all over Washington, senators in mirrors
will practice until they are as fluent
saying homosexual
as they already are at saying Mr. President,
and first-strike option.
Sometimes we think the truth
is the worst thing that could happen
but the truth is not the worst thing that could happen.
Now it is autumn and in stores
the turquoise wading pools
spangled with bright starfishes and shells
are stacked against the walls, on sale,
implying that what was costly yesterday
is cheap today, and might be free tomorrow—
All our yearnings, all our fears:
so many seahorses,
galloping through bubbles.
—Tony Hoagland, “Hearings,” Donkey Gospel (1998)
