Category: Poetry

A lesser-used category, that includes poems – mostly by me, but not exclusively.

Poetry Of Departures

by Philip Larkin

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:
He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think.
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
It’s specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
And that helps me to stay
Sober and industrious.
But I’d go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c’sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object:
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

How strange

Had some warthog at SB’s house tonight. Some good wine and conversation, and reaffirmation that all the things I want to say to you are worth saying, if only for myself. It’s strange to now know – to understand, to be more accurate – the multiple ways in which one has sabotaged one’s own existence, along with those of others, and to not be able to explore the issues with the relevant person. The astonishment at one’s own blindness is so striking that it’s equally astonishing that one could have been so blind.

Reading Raymond Carver tonight. This is his:

Hummingbird

Suppose I say summer,
write the word “hummingbird,”
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.

Aubade

by Paul Auster

Not even the sky.
But a memory of sky,
and the blue of the earth
in your lungs.

Earth
less earth: to watch
how the sky will enclose you, grow vast
with the words
you leave unsaid – and nothing
will be lost.

I am your distress, the seam
in the wall
that opens to the wind
and its stammering, storm
in the plural – this other name
you give your world: exile
in the rooms of home.

Dawn folds, fathers
witness,
the aspen and the ash
that fall. I come back to you
through this fire, a remnant
of the season to come,
and will be to you
as dust, as air,
as nothing
that will not haunt you.
In the place before breath
we feel our shadows cross.