Anglophile

January 28, 2004

It's still the most precious dream,
this spot in my mind I hold down
with an added u to color or e in gray.
With red buses, two levels tall,
red phone booths, old castles
and old bridges with clocks
on a river probably overflowing
with sewage of a thousand years
next to small rental flats
that cost more than this house,
and back to that Eastern coast
where rocks drop heavy to the beach.
The minutest of details gripped
and held me infatuated by you.
I remember Epcot's England, too.
Seventeen years have passed
since I spent an hour in that
fantasy of a land across the sea.
I bought English rose bouquets,
English tea, and English muffins.
I bought a flag of crossing lines.
I learned a little of the oddities
from "Young Ones", "Comic Strip",
"Monty Python", and PBS imports.
I took on a false accent,
and suffered for my "agane"
when quoting English singers.
Long into the night there,
and past my bedtime here,
you'd confuse me in your slang.
I learned "cor" and "now you're laughing"
and "right as rain" before it was
alright to say it around here.
I know so well the hour difference.
I can look at my clock to see
five hours plus my own time.
The driving on the lefthand side,
the speaking without moving
the upper lip, and quiet tea times,
the other football, the cabbies,
the lifts, the loo, the delicacy
of acting with gentility and grace
juxtaposed in my head with
soccer, taxicabs, elevators,
the bathroom and blunt brashness.
And later, Bronte, Shakespeare,
Shelley, Keats, and Tennyson
added a better flavor of romance
to my already excessive love
for a land yet unseen, but adored
perpetually, deep in secret longing.
The more midwestern I become,
the more I hear in myself American
attitudes and aesthetics and ideas,
the more I long for that same dream
of an England that may not be true
except for a vision I imagined real.