Big Grab

The corn-chip engineer gets a bright idea,
and talks to the corn-chip executive
and six months later at the factory they begin subtracting
a few chips from every bag,

but they still call it on the outside wrapper,
The Big Grab,
so the concept of Big is quietly modified
to mean More Or Less Large, or Only Slightly
                                                            Less Big Than Before.

Confucius said this would happen—
that language would be hijacked and twisted
by a couple of tricksters from the Business Department

and from then on words would get crookeder and crookeder
until no one would know how to build a staircase,
or to size up a horse by its teeth
or when it is best to shut up.

We live in that time that he predicted.
Nothing means what it says,
and it says it all the time.
Out on Route 28, the lights blaze all night
on a billboard of a beautiful girl
covered with melted cheese—

See how she beckons to the river of late-night cars!
See how the tipsy drivers swerve,
under the breathalyzer moon!

In a story whose beginning I must have missed,
without a name for the thing
I can barely comprehend I desire,

I speak these words that do not know
where they’re going.

No wonder I want something more or less large
and salty for lunch.
No wonder I stare into space while eating it.

----

Dialectical Materialism

I was thinking about dialectical materialism at the supermarket,

strolling among the Chilean tomatoes and the Filipino pineapples,

admiring the Washington-state apples stacked in perfect pyramid displays
by the ebony man from Zimbabwe wearing the Chicago Bulls t-shirt.

I was seeing the whole produce section
                                as a system of cross-referenced signifiers
in a textbook of historical economics

and the fine spray that misted the vegetables
was like the cool mist of style imposed on meaning.

It was one of those days
when interpretation is brushing its varnish over everything

when even the birds are speaking complete sentences

and the sun is a brassy blond novelist of immense accomplishment
     dictating her new blockbuster
to a stenographer who types at the speed of light
and publishes each page as fast as it is written.

There was cornbread rising in the bakery department
and in its warm aroma I believed that I could smell
                             the exhaled breath of vanished Iroquois,
their journey west and
                               delicate withdrawal into the forests,

whereas by comparison
the coarse-grained wheat baguettes

seemed to irrepressibly exude
             the sturdy sweat and labor of eighteenth-century Europe.

My god there is so much sorrow in the grocery store!
You would have to be high
on the fumes of the piped-in pan flutes
                          of commodified Peruvian folk music

not to be driven practically crazy
with awe and shame,
not to weep at the scale of subjugated matter:

the ripped-up etymologies of kiwi fruit and bratwurst,
the roads paved with dead languages,
the jungles digested by foreign money.

It’s the owners, I said to myself;
it’s the horrible juggernaut of progress;

but the cilantro in my hand
opened up its bitter minty ampoule underneath my nose

and the bossa nova muzak charmed me like a hypnotist
and he pretty cashier with the shaved head and nose ring
                                said, Have a nice day.

as I burst with my groceries through the automatic doors
into the open air,

where I found myself in a giant parking lot
at a mega-mall outside of Minneapolis,

                        where in row E 87
a Ford Escort from Mankato
           had just had a fender-bender with a Honda from Miami;

and these personified portions of my heart, the drivers,
were standing there
in the gathering Midwestern granular descending dusk

waiting for the troopers to fill out the accident report,

with the rotating red light of the squad car
                       whipping in circles above them,
splashing their shopped-out middle-aged faces
                           with war paint the hue of cherry Gatorade

and each of them was thinking
how with dialectical materialism, accidents happen:

how at any minute,
convenience can turn
                   into a kind of trouble you never wanted.

----

Snowglobe

In an alleyway beside a nightclub
a miniature figure is vomiting:

that’s how you know this is no
ordinary snowglobe. There are stockbrokers visible

in tall office buildings
staring at lit computer screens

for the slippery secret of money. It is late;
the babysitter turns up the volume on her headphones

to Mach 5
while the kids go out on the balcony to play.

Oh life! Are you even sober?
Can you touch your index finger

with the tip of your nose?
While great corporations drag their shades
                                 across the land

like giant cloud formations,
sucking up pesos in one place,

raining down yuan in another.

Chopsticks and cancer and yellow cabs.
The interstate buzzing with metallic bees.

The greasy haze on the city shoulders.
While in the park a flock of poodles
escapes from the dogwalker’s grip

like a pack of balloons.

At the bottom, a thickness that gathers,
like leftover gravy;

at the top, hope, like a pocket of air.
But what would happen if right now

it all turned upside down?

----

From Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty. © 2010 by Tony Hoagland. All rights reserved.