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- Self-Improvement
- by Tony Hoagland
- Just before she flew off like a swan
- to her wealthy parents’ summer home,
- Bruce’s college girlfriend asked him
- to improve his expertise at oral sex,
- and offered him some technical advice:
- Use nothing but his tonguetip
- to flick the light switch in his room
- on and off a hundred times a day
- until he grew fluent at the nuances
- of force and latitude.
- Imagine him at practice every evening,
- more inspired than he ever was at algebra,
- beads of sweat sprouting on his brow,
- thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
- seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind’s eye,
- the quadratic equation of her climax
- yield to the logic
- of his simple math.
- Maybe he unscrewed
- the bulb from his apartment ceiling
- so that passersby would not believe
- a giant firefly was pulsing
- its electric abdomen in 13 B.
- Maybe, as he stood
- two inches from the wall,
- in darkness, fogging the old plaster
- with his breath, he visualized the future
- as a mansion standing on the shore
- that he was rowing to
- with his tongue’s exhausted oar.
- Of course, the girlfriend dumped him:
- met someone, apres-ski, who,
- using nothing but his nose
- could identify the vintage of a Cabernet.
- Sometimes we are asked
- to get good at something we have
- no talent for,
- or we excel at something we will never
- have the opportunity to prove.
- Often we ask ourselves
- to make absolute sense
- out of what just happens,
- and in this way, what we are practicing
- is suffering,
- which everybody practices,
- but strangely few of us
- grow graceful in.
- The climaxes of suffering are complex,
- costly, beautiful, but secret.
- Bruce never played the light switch again.
- So the avenues we walk down,
- full of bodies wearing faces,
- are full of hidden talent:
- enough to make pianos moan,
- sidewalks split,
- streetlights deliriously flicker
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