Poemunity — your poem community

Why do you subdue yourself in golds and purples? Why do you dim yourself with folded silks? Do you not see that I can buy brocades in any draper’s shop, And that I am choked in the twilight of all these colors. How pale you would be, and startling— How quiet; But your curves would spring upward Like a clear jet of flung water, You would quiver like a shot-up spray of water, You would waver, and relapse, and tremble. And I too should tremble, Watching. Murex-dyes and tinsel— And yet I think I could bear your beauty unshaded.

is my heart. A stranger berry there never was, tartless. Gone sour in the sun, in the sunroom or moonroof, roofless. No poetry. Plain. No fresh, special recipe to bless. All I’ve ever made with these hands and life, less substance, more rind. Mostly rim and trim, meatless but making much smoke in the old smokehouse, no less. Fatted from the day, overripe and even toxic at eve. Nonetheless, in the end, if you must know, if I must bend, waistless, to that excruciation. No marvel, no harvest left me speechless, yet I find myself somehow with heart, aloneless. With heart, fighting fire with fire, fightless. That loud hub of us, meat stub of us, beating us senseless. Spectacular in its way, its way of not seeing, congealing dayless but in everydayness. In that hopeful haunting (a lesser way of saying in darkness) there is silencelessness for the pressing question. Heart, what art you? War, star, part? Or less: playing a part, staying apart from the one who loves, loveless.

i read your poem over and over in this landscape of women women purring on balconies overlooking the indigo sea my mother's blue taffeta dress is black as the sea she glides out my door to the beach where sleek white boats are anchored under a full, luscious moon still i am still the wind outside my window my mother's ghost evaporates in the long atlantic night i listen to the radio every chance i get for news of your city's latest disaster everything here the color of honey and sand everything there verges on catastrophe a constant preoccupation with real estate everything here a calm horizon taut bodies carefully nurtured oiled & gleaming hair & skin i read your poem over and over turning my head from prying eyes the low hum of women singing in another room i switch stations on the radio turn up the volume i almost touch the air buzzing electricity james brown "live at the apollo" the smooth female d.j. interrupts bo diddley groaning "i'm a man" it is a joke here in this baby-blue resort where art is a full-time hobby art is what everyone claims to do women sprawl like cats on each other's laps licking the salt off each other's skin and i walk in search of the portuguese fishermen who hide in the scorched trees the bleak, blond dunes that line the highway i imagine you asleep in another city i take your poem apart line by line it is a love letter we wrote each other some time ago trying in vain to pinpoint that first, easy thrill.

I like to feel like a Champion. Listening to Frankie Valli say "I can't take my eyes off of you" I feel like New York City is a scale model in my penthouse in North Carolina where I study economics, capital markets, and the World Bank. I like to look into a scene from the top of a building in my hometown down at the traders who are moving here from New York City because New York City started to be kind of like a losing place for wealth creation. Now I look down on them and say to myself "I'm too big to fail." I take my keys off of the ledge and walk down the condominium tower overlooking the entire city. When I reach the parking deck I open the door of a 1980 Mercedes Benz 450 SL and coast to a place called High Street. I'm at High Street knocking back a gin and tonic with three girls I met at the Arts & Technology Center conference on the decline of the book. We have a laugh about the old guard who make a book bound in glue and then pinch angel dust off our palms. At this point I'm so high I'm like, look, why don't we excuse ourselves and go up to my condominium tower I've just invested 3.5 million dollars in. They are like uh, we can do that. So we pile into my 450 SL and ride to the tower listening to the music of Frankie Valli transform our night into a piece of artwork. Nearly there, I look around at the Arts & Technology girls and sort of hum to myself. I feel like I've hit a milestone in my evening when we trip into the foyer of my massive penthouse that has those gleaming glass cubes set into the wall you see in Miami or Miami Beach. From the cubes a glimmer of the prosperity circling this region pierces the dark in the form of an orange- yellow beam of fluorescent light. One of the girls is removing her jewelry and I'm like no, don't. She takes off her clothes instead and lies face down on the carpet. At the stereo I play a song by Frankie Valli. The other two are kind of standing around surprised, I think, by the curtain of paperback books lining the north wall. Those are only bound books I tell them while I finger the Kindle on my coffee table. It is the new large Kindle and we are looking at a book called Boredom by Alberto Moravia, taking turns reading passages from the screen. When we get to the part when the boho girl is fucking the protagonist the totally white breast of one of the Arts & Technology girls slips coolly from her blouse. Pretending not to notice I continue to read in my turn. The girl sitting on the other side of me is wearing some totally white string of pearls and she's removing everything but the pearls. I continue to read the screen while the Arts & Technology girls start to make out like I had been planning for them to do ever since we licked angel dust off each other's palms. I get up and go to the stereo, set the needle back to the gold record "Can't Take My Eyes Off You," and walk calmly to the sofa. Once I'm there I melt into the sand-rubbed upholstery with the Arts & Technology girls who haven't yet passed out on the floor. While I'm lying with my back to the armrest I glimpse a piece of sky I've seen only in films of the old grain. It's a wild purple darkness with a bright white hole in it. I'm thinking to myself God, my personal Jesus Christ and saviour, I want you to come down here through that hole in the night and join me in Eden.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations Side by side Side by side To see a recent photograph of this tomb of the Earl and Countess of Arundel that Larkin is describing, click here. , their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits habits Clothes vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd— The little dogs under their feet. Such plainness of the pre-baroque pre-baroque In Larkin’s pronunciation, the phrase rhymes with 'shock.' The Baroque period, exemplified by ornamentation, followed the Renaissance. This tomb was sculpted in the Middle Ages. Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left-hand gauntlet gauntlet An armored glove, worn in the Middle Ages , still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with a sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy effigy A sculptured likeness Was just a detail friends would see: A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base. They would not guess how early in Their supine supine On their backs stationary voyage The air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the glass. A bright Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths The endless altered people came, Washing at their identity. Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins skeins Used figuratively, a skein is a quantity of thread Above their scrap of history, Only an Only an When first published in June 1956 in the London Magazine, the line began: Only their attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon blazon Both a coat of arms, and a public proclamation , and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love.

As naught gives way to aught and oxhide gives way to chain mail and byrnie gives way to battle-ax and Cavalier gives way to Roundhead and Cromwell Road gives way to the Connaught and I Am Curious (Yellow) gives way to I Am Curious (Blue) and barrelhouse gives way to Frank’N’Stein and a pint of Shelley plain to a pint of India Pale Ale I give way to you. As bass gives way to baritone and hammock gives way to hummock and Hoboken gives way to Hackensack and bread gives way to reed bed and bald eagle gives way to Theobald Wolfe Tone and the Undertones give way to Siouxsie Sioux and DeLorean, John, gives way to Deloria, Vine, and Pierced Nose to Big Stomach I give way to you. As vent gives way to Ventry and the King of the World gives way to Finn MacCool and phone gives way to fax and send gives way to sned and Dagenham gives way to Coventry and Covenanter gives way to caribou and the caribou gives way to the carbine and Boulud’s cackamamie to the cock-a-leekie of Boole I give way to you. As transhumance gives way to trance and shaman gives way to Santa and butcher’s string gives way to vacuum pack and the ineffable gives way to the unsaid and pyx gives way to monstrance and treasure aisle gives way to need-blind pew and Calvin gives way to Calvin Klein and Town and Country Mice to Hanta I give way to you. As Hopi gives way to Navaho and rug gives way to rag and Pax Vobiscum gives way to Tampax and Tampa gives way to the water bed and The Water Babies gives way to Worstward Ho and crapper gives way to loo and spruce gives way to pine and the carpet of pine needles to the carpetbag I give way to you. As gombeen-man gives way to not-for-profit and soft soap gives way to Lynn C. Doyle and tick gives way to tack and Balaam’s Ass gives way to Mister Ed and Songs of Innocence gives way to The Prophet and single-prop Bar-B-Q gives way to twin-screw and the Salt Lick gives way to the County Line and “Mending Wall” gives way to “Build Soil” I give way to you. As your hummus gives way to your foul madams and your coy mistress gives way to “The Flea” and flax gives way to W. D. Flackes and the living give way to the dead and John Hume gives way to Gerry Adams and Television gives way to U2 and Lake Constance gives way to the Rhine and the Rhine to the Zuider Zee I give way to you. As dutch treat gives way to french leave and spanish fly gives way to Viagra and slick gives way to slack and the local fuzz give way to the Feds and Machiavelli gives way to make-believe and Howards End gives way to A Room with a View and Wordsworth gives way to “Woodbine Willie” and stereo Nagra to quad Niagara I give way to you. As cathedral gives way to cavern and cookie cutter gives way to cookie and the rookies give way to the All-Blacks and the shad give way to the smoke shed and the roughshod give way to the Black Horse avern that still rings true despite that T being missing from its sign where a little nook gives way to a little nookie when I give way to you. That Nanook of the North should give way to Man of Aran as ling gives way to cod and cod gives way to kayak and Camp Moosilauke gives way to Club Med and catamite gives way to catamaran and catamaran to aluminum canoe is symptomatic of a more general decline whereby a cloud succumbs to a clod and I give way to you. For as Monet gives way to Juan Gris and Juan Gris gives way to Joan Miró and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer gives way to Miramax and the Volta gives way to Travolta, swinging the red-hot lead, and Saturday Night Fever gives way to Grease and the Greeks give way to you know who and the Roman IX gives way to the Arabic 9 and nine gives way, as ever, to zero I give way to you.

because my voice was not the right voice and could not be understood I stood before the mirror— a murky glassen word this mouth can’t shape right to this day — and was made to watch my teeth and lips being imprecise. So this is why I come across a Southron and not from Yorkshire, or Sri Lankan; but I’ll complain no more about this clarified and potent tongue for when the moustached gent at US Customs asked me in his hapless twang are you a terrorist, my borrowed posh it sure abashed that poor colonial; and it was of course what my child-face perceived or could not in the glass which made of me a scrutineer of sound, a listener for and into every glitch in the aathma, the script, the avid void of English.

Elm branches radiate green heat, blackbirds stiffly strut across fields. Beneath bedroom wood floor, I feel earth— bread in an oven that slowly swells, simmering my Navajo blanket thread-crust as white-feathered and corn-tasseled Corn Dancers rise in a line, follow my calf, vanish in a rumple and surface at my knee-cliff, chanting. Wearing shagged buffalo headgear, Buffalo Dancer chases Deer Woman across Sleeping Leg mountain. Branches of wild rose trees rattle seeds. Deer Woman fades into hills of beige background. Red Bird of my heart thrashes wildly after her. What a stupid man I have been! How good to let imagination go, step over worrisome events, those hacked logs tumbled about in the driveway. Let decisions go! Let them blow like school children’s papers against the fence, rattling in the afternoon wind. This Red Bird of my heart thrashes within the tidy appearance I offer the world, topples what I erect, snares what I set free, dashes what I’ve put together, indulges in things left unfinished, and my world is left, as children know, left as toys after dark in the sandbox.

as freedom is a breakfastfood or truth can live with right and wrong or molehills are from mountains made —long enough and just so long will being pay the rent of seem and genius please the talentgang and water most encourage flame as hatracks into peachtrees grow or hopes dance best on bald men ’ s hair and every finger is a toe and any courage is a fear —long enough and just so long will the impure think all things pure and hornets wail by children stung or as the seeing are the blind and robins never welcome spring nor flatfolk prove their world is round nor dingsters die at break of dong and common’s rare and millstones float —long enough and just so long tomorrow will not be too late worms are the words but joy’s the voice down shall go which and up come who breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs deeds cannot dream what dreams can do —time is a tree(this life one leaf) but love is the sky and i am for you just so long and long enough

What do we do with the body, do we burn it, do we set it in dirt or in stone, do we wrap it in balm, honey, oil, and then gauze and tip it onto and trust it to a raft and to water? What will happen to the memory of his body, if one of us doesn't hurry now and write it down fast? Will it be salt or late light that it melts like? Floss, rubber gloves, and a chewed cap to a pen elsewhere —how are we to regard his effects, do we throw them or use them away, do we say they are relics and so treat them like relics? Does his soiled linen count? If so, would we be wrong then, to wash it? There are no instructions whether it should go to where are those with no linen, or whether by night we should memorially wear it ourselves, by day reflect upon it folded, shelved, empty. Here, on the floor behind his bed is a bent photo—why? Were the two of them lovers? Does it mean, where we found it, that he forgot it or lost it or intended a safekeeping? Should we attempt to make contact? What if this other man too is dead? Or alive, but doesn't want to remember, is human? Is it okay to be human, and fall away from oblation and memory, if we forget, and can't sometimes help it and sometimes it is all that we want? How long, in dawns or new cocks, does that take? What if it is rest and nothing else that we want? Is it a findable thing, small? In what hole is it hidden? Is it, maybe, a country? Will a guide be required who will say to us how? Do we fly? Do we swim? What will I do now, with my hands?