Bill Hoagland

Poetry

 

 

 

Deuces Wild

 

Gamblers lost in the shade of their hour

speaking as if they are giving dictation,

one to the other, neither to both—

spare conversation.

 

Rip of the deck. She shuffles and deals.

Cards descend like fat elm leaves.

He bluffs and bets his undershirt,

she her chemise.

 

Caprice is whim within her glance.

She calls his sock with her brassiere,

then drops a flush atop his pair,

stifling a cheer.

 

She notes how well he takes defeat.

He smirks and thinks, it's time to cheat.

 

 

 

One Morning After

 

Lingering doorward to relish

their evening before,

one hand on his chest,

one hand cradling his coat,

he thinks how emotions

sometimes gust and lull,

swell and lapse,

 

and so explains obliquely

to himself his rigid guise,

obliterated unpredictably

when that distant inner singing

welled through lungs

and throat, played about

his tongue and teeth and lips,

 

and how he said what he said

while she said what she said

and later how they talked

about new ambivalences

as he stroked her hair

and she patted his knee.

 

 

 

A Bit of Dinner

 

Civil war

between the upstarts

and the status quo.

 

Declarations

of intent, the clink

of forks on china.

 

He lobs a look

of pity

like a hand-grenade,

 

counts down to

detonation.

Shock to anger

 

in her eyes,

she withers him

with bee bullet

 

insults

to the throat

and scrotum.

 

 

 

Equivocations

 

Suppose

she knows what he knows,

pensive at her mirror,

now dear

 

to him

across the interim

of easy moments gone

along

 

this line

of time he will refine

in memory. To know,

although

 

she leans

toward the glass to preen,

pluck each eyebrow lightly,

still free

 

of this,

his keepsake artifice

contrived to mend his heart

apart

 

from view—

if she should say adieu

before he could prepare

to bear

 

the end,

how would he then contend

with what he has become?

For some

 

time now

he's had to disavow

that what he's fearful of

is love.

 

 

 

The Fretful Vigilant Keeps Watch

 

Moods like these he has traced before,

floating from candor to vanity,

from faith in his impunity

to doubt, autobiographer

of love and baffled refugee,

passion's virgin, passion's connoisseur.

 

This time he asks himself, "What kind

of cynic reads emotion in its surge

and pool, an eye submerged

beneath a skimming waterline,

waiting where two elements converge?"

His old rejoinder, new again: "My kind."

 

 

 

Bill Hoagland's poems have appeared in The Carolina Quarterly, Denver Quarterly, Galway Review, Hollins' Critic, Seneca Review, and many other journals as well as in the anthologies "The Last Best Place", "Words on the Waves", and "Ring of Fire: Writers of the Yellowstone Region". A new book of poems, "Strawberries", is forthcoming from Kelsay Books. The poems here are from an experimental lyrical narrative chapbook titled "one2one".