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.)

Tony Hoagland's "Field Guide"

FIELD GUIDE


Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in the most precious element of all,


I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water


at the very instant when a dragonfly, 
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,


hovered over it, then lit, then rested.
That's all.


I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page


in certain library books,
so the the next reader will know


where to look for the good parts.

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


This book was a gift from my friend Meredith, and I appreciate the giving and the given.

One Poem By Tony Hoagland: "Nature"

My friend Meredith gave me Tony Hoagland's Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty, a volume of poems that seems to fit me like my old Batman cape and cowl did, like my fins do now. I'm just in my first reading, so the hedging in the phrasing there, but I certainly want to share this one right away. Read. Read aloud, and enjoy.

NATURE

I miss the friendship with the pine tree and the birds

that I had when I was ten.

And it has been forever since I pushed my head

under the wild silk skirt of the waterfall.

What I had with them was tender and private.

The lake was practically my girlfriend.

I carried her picture in my front shirt pocket.

Even in my sleep, I heard the sound of water.

The big rock on the shore was the skull of a dead king

whose name we could almost remember.

Under the rooty bank you could dimly see

the bunk beds of the turtles.

Maybe twice had I sad a girl's name to myself.

I had not yet had my weird first dream of money.

Nobody I know mentions these things anymore.

It's as if their memories have been seized, erased, and relocated

among flowcharts and complex dinner-party calendars.

Now I want to turn and run back the other way,

barefoot into the underbrush,

getting raked by thorns, being slapped in the face by branches.

Down to the muddy bed of the little stream

where my cupped hands make a house, and

I tilt up the roof

to look at the face of the frog.

--Tony Hoagland

P.S. Note how "the frog" works differently, works so much better, than "a frog." And that's just one minor joy of this poem.

P.P.S. Thank you, Meredith.