Poetry: The Hero's Journey, by Tony Hoagland

[resonant]

I remember the first time I looked at the spotless marble floor
of a giant hotel lobby
and understood that someone had waxed and polished it all night

and that someone else had pushed his cart of cleaning supplies
down the long air-conditioned corridors
of the Steinberg Building across the street

and emptied all two hundred and forty-three wastebaskets
stopping now and then to scrape up chewing gum
with a special flat-bladed tool

he keeps in his back
pocket.

It tempered my enthusiasm for "The Collected Sonnets of Hugh Pembley-Witherton"
and for Kurt von Heinzelman's "Epic of the Seekers for the Grail,"

Chapter 5, "The Trial," in which he describes how the
"tall and fair-complexioned" knight, Gawain,
makes camp one night beside a windblown cemetery

but cannot sleep for all the voices
rising up from underground --

Let him stay out there a hundred nights, the little wonder boy,
with his thin blanket and his cold armor and his
useless sword,

until he understands exactly how
the glory of the protagonist is always paid for
by a lot of secondary characters.

In the morning he will wake and gallop back to safety;
he will hear his name embroidered into toasts and songs.

But now he knows there is a country he had not accounted for,
and that country has its citizens:

the one-armed baker sweeping out his shop at 4 a.m.;

soldiers fitting every horse in Prague with diapers
before the emperor's arrival;


and that woman in the nursing home,
who has worked there for a thousand years,

taking away the bedpans,
lifting up and wiping off the soft heroic buttocks of Odysseus.

-----

I can't figure out how to keep the poet's horizontal spacing! Each line of each stanza has a small hanging indent (feels kind of like pushing something heavy for one more step and one more step), and then there's one deep indent for a few lines that point you to the invisible world of work ("rising up from underground," "by a lot of secondary characters," "before the emperor's arrival") and another much deeper indent for tools ("he keeps in his back / pocket" and "useless sword").

Comments

[out_there]

Even without the fancy spacing, that's a moving poem. I'm not huge into poetry, but I really liked that.

[mergatrude]

Oh wow! This is very cool. I went to https://voetica.com/poem/9086 and listened to the poet read it (it looks like he's changed a couple of line) and yes. It expanded and contracted something in my chest. Thank you.

[ranalore]

I spend a lot of this month hardcoding spaces, until I can hardly stand to look ampersands and semi-colons the rest of the year, and I love me a semi-colon.

Outstanding poem.