History of Desire

by Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

Poetry and Prose
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Striking a balance between politics and gizmos, I wanted to post a poem that has long been a favorite of mine.  It is not mainstream, which makes it all the better.  I wanted to post it after thinking about a title for the Twitter hashtag #sixwordstories.  I was thinking about it and somehow my mind wandered back to this poem I had long loved and ironically, posted it from a submission way back in 1996 when I ran a little poetry review website called “Seasons.”  I wish I would have kept up with that back then, because I was getting a lot of feedback and submissions.

Long story short, I received this poem from Civ Cedering and posted it.  It has always been something that touched me and I posted it a couple times in passing here and there.  Well, I tried searching for it online and while I found many references to Civ Cedering (including the fact that she unfortunately passed away from cancer in 2007), I could not find this poem.  So I dug through the scraps of my past and found it (most likely printed on my HP500c which was a big improvement from my Epson dot matrix printer).  <– added for the benefit of geeks

I am very happy that I researched this.  First of all I thought maybe this person was just someone who decided to send me their poetry so I would post it for kicks.  I didn’t realize that Civ Cedering was a very accomplished poet, novelist and sculptor.  So when I searched for this poem and found not a reference to it anywhere, it made me even more determined to re-find it and post it.  Hopefully, I lead others to discover/rediscover it as well.

Poetry and Prose
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