Tony Hoagland's "Not Renouncing"

NOT RENOUNCING


I always thought that I was going to catch Elena
in the library one afternoon, and she would shove me gently backwards
into the corridor of 822.7 in the Dewey Decimal System,
where we would do it in the cul-de-sac of 18th century drama.


Or I though we would meet by chance
in a bed and breakfast on the Delaware seashore,
and B and B each other in a helter skelter
of goose-down duvets and chamomile tea.


When I flew over the high plains of Wyoming,
I dreamed of taking off her cowboy shirt
and seeing her pale skin in a field of windswept prairie grass
that kept us completely from sight,


and even in the British National Museum
I fell into a trance before the model 
of the castle and the moat, the drawbridge
and the catapult, with all those moveable, moving parts.


This is the imagination of a man.
It wanes and waxes all through his life, 
like a kind of tumescence.  I am not bragging
and I'm not renouncing.


I stood in one garden,
looking over the fence at another.
I thought I had to change my life or give up,
but I didn't.  Year after year


they kept growing into each other:
the dreamed into the real,
the real into the dreamed--the two gardens


sending their flexible, sinuous vines,
their tendrils and unbuttoning blossoms, 
ceaselessly over their borders.

--Tony Hoagland,

Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty,
Graywolf Press: Minneapolis, MN, 2010.

(Thanks, Meredith, for the gift.)