Tony Hoagland

An Intimate Moment of Protestant Despair Witnessed on the Four O’ Clock Train
March 20, 2013 Hoagland Tony

An Intimate Moment of Protestant Despair Witnessed on the Four O’ Clock Train

 

He put down his Wall Street Journal,

and leaned forward to rest his elegant WASP head

against the green vinyl seat-back in front of him

 

–and it seemed to me the sigh he sighed

was a great exhalation of old dynastic air,

as if he had somehow overheard my unkind thoughts

 

about his Yale class ring and tasseled leather shoes.

Or as if, from high in the stratosphere

he had felt the inexorable rotation of the Aztec clock,

 

predicting the extinction of the stock exchange,

the midget owl,  the literary novel, the G and T,

the Arctic caribou, and he.

 

No more sailboat parties and au pairs!

no more riding lessons for the girls!

the whole ecology of khaki pants and summers on the beach

 

pulled out to sea

in a long withdrawing tide

of Izod shirts and Jay McInerny novels,

 

–the four horsemen of apocalypse

riding in on polo ponies

whose names are Ralph Lauren, Hugh Hefner, John Cheever,

and  Henry Cabot Lodge.

 

These visions of the end–

each of us will be required

to submit to one of them.  In his dream, he sees

 

a woman strolling on a beach three hundred years from now

who plucks a button from the sand,

and rubs her fingertip across

 

the tiny anchor stamped into the brass;

a little golden amulet; a charm,

a wonder of the ancient world.

 

Tony Hoagland’s newest collections of poems are Recent Changes in the Vernacular (Tres Chicas Press, 2017) and Priest Turned Therapist