It’s winter; I’m reading What Narcissism Means
to Me, and my son in the next room tells his friend,
my mom’s house burned down when she was a kid.
For a moment, I’m wearing flip-flops and a colored robe,
the house burning around me lighting up my imagination
like a flashlight borrowed from Tony, and I’m waving
across the years to my son and my son’s friend,
the time between then and now about what it takes
to finish reading “Narcissus Lullabye” and turn
the page. Tony Hoagland’s tongue is his best muscle;
you just know he’s been taking his own advice, turning
light switches on and off with it. In Malkovich no one
wants to be themselves, and in all of T’s poems, that’s all
he is, the gospel of self, the season of being alive
never waning. So there I am, forgiven for being
on that second floor, my robe the color of a New York sunset
over New Jersey, and Tony and Malkovich are both below
in the yard yelling, Jump! I’ll catch you, like I should trust
either of them, but I do, jump that is, and the house
becomes ash sifting down over my son and his friend,
like we’ve been caught in a snowstorm. My son says,
Ma, tell us the story, and I do, since the sins of the mother
are only in what’s withheld and narcissism is learning
to embrace what you know can’t ever be caught.
It’s winter; I’m telling a story, and the time it takes
is the time from one blazing moment to the next
the water to douse them as elusive as your image
in a pond, as vital as the book my son’s friend takes
with him when he heads out into the sweet wreckage
of winter singing a lullaby he didn’t know existed.
Laura McCullough
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/what-tony-hogland-means-to-me-or-why-i-d-rather/
