How It Adds Up

By Tony Hoagland b. 1953 Tony Hoagland

There was the day we swam in a river, a lake, and an ocean.

And the day I quit the job my father got me.

And the day I stood outside a door,

and listened to my girlfriend making love

to someone obviously not me, inside,

and I felt strange because I didn’t care.

There was the morning I was born,

and the year I was a loser,

and the night I was the winner of the prize

for which the audience applauded.

Then there was someone else I met,

whose face and voice I can’t forget,

and the memory of her

is like a jail I’m trapped inside,

or maybe she is something I just use

to hold my real life at a distance.

Happiness, Joe says, is a wild red flower

                      plucked from a river of lava

and held aloft on a tightrope

                      strung between two scrawny trees

above a canyon

in a manic-depressive windstorm.

Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it, Don’t drop it—,

And when you do, you will keep looking for it

everywhere, for years,

while right behind you,

the footprints you are leaving

will look like notes

of a crazy song.

Source: What Narcissism Means to Me (Graywolf Press, 2003)

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Poet Tony Hoagland b. 1953

Subjects Living, Disappointment & Failure

More about this poem

Tony Hoagland was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and attended Williams College, the University of Iowa, and the University of Arizona. His published works include A Change in Plans (1985), Talking to Stay Warm (1986), History of Desire (1990), Sweet Ruin (1992), which was chosen for the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and won the Zacharis Award from Emerson College, Donkey Gospel (1998), winner of the James Laughlin Award, What . . .

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