By Tony Hoagland, from his book “Sweet Ruin.”<\/p>\n
(Thanks to Addie Rimmer for introducing me to his poetry.)<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
You’re the Top<\/p>\n
Of all the people that I’ve ever known
\nI think my grandmother Bernice
\nwould be best qualified to be beside me now<\/p>\n
driving north of Boston in a rented car
\nwhile Cole Porter warbles on the radio;
\nOnly she would be trivial and un-<\/p>\n
politically correct enough to totally enjoy
\nthe rhyming of Mahatma Ghandi
\nwith Napoleon brandy;<\/p>\n
and she would understand, from 1948,
\nthe miracle that once was cellophane,
\nwhich Porter rhymes with night in Spain.<\/p>\n
She loved that image of the high gay life
\nwhere people dressed by servants
\nturned every night into the Ritz:<\/p>\n
dancing through a shower of just
\nuncorked champagne
\ninto the shelter of a dry martini.<\/p>\n
When she was 70 and I was young
\nI hated how a life of privilege
\nhad kept her ignorance intact<\/p>\n
about the world beneath her pretty feet,
\nhow she believed that people with good manners
\nnaturally had yachts, knew how to waltz<\/p>\n
and dribbled French into their sentences
\nlike salad dressing. My liberal adolescent rage
\nwas like a righteous fist back then<\/p>\n
that wouldn’t let me rest,
\nbut I’ve come far enough from who I was
\nto see her as she saw herself:<\/p>\n
a tipsy debutante in 1938,
\nkicking off a party with her shoes;
\nlaunching the lipstick-red high heel
\nfrom her elegant big toe<\/p>\n
into the orbit of a chandelier
\nsuspended in a lyric by Cole Porter,
\nbright and beautiful and useless.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
By Tony Hoagland, from his book “Sweet Ruin.” (Thanks to Addie Rimmer for introducing me to his poetry.) You’re the Top Of all the people that I’ve ever known I think my grandmother Bernice would be best qualified to be beside me now driving north of Boston in a rented car while Cole Porter […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[220,219],"class_list":["post-1789","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-people-people","tag-sweet-ruin","tag-tony-hoagland","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1789"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1790,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1789\/revisions\/1790"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1789"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1789"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/auslander.online\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1789"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}