This Creme Egg is yours.
I bought this for you thirty-one days ago.
I was not sure when I would see you,
so I bought thirty-two Creme Eggs.
In the last thirty-one days
I ate the other thirty-one
because I lack self-control.
It is lucky that I saw you today.
till we edge beyond the fuzziness of presumed
contact. Oh stranger boy,
your face is like mine. But we sign cheques with different hands.
Now we wear each other’s cologne,
we have a cologne. The tendrils of our lungs
function harder when apart.
If you see this scarf around my neck it means
unravel the scarf from around my neck.
If you see this blanket at my shoulders it means
drape yourself about my shoulders. This is a dance
of not having to ask for things. Our limbs
are in sumptuous complicity.
We’ve become free of hoping to be beautiful
in photographs. Between us – it’s a cinch,
and breakfast is always taken lazily. Oddball talk
will enchant me, endlessly, so tell those stories
as though we’d not yet met.
john berryman asked me to write a poem about roosters.
elizabeth bishop, he said, once wrote a poem about roosters.
do your poems use capital letters? he asked. like god?
i said. god no, he said, like princeton! i said,
god preserve me if i ever write a poem about princeton, and i thought,
o john berryman, what has brought me into this company of poets
where the masculine thing to do is use capital letters
and even princeton struts like one of god’s betters?
In your next letter I wish you’d say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you’re pursuing:
taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road gose round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,
and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you’re in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,
and most of the jokes you just can’t catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so teribly late,
and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.
—Wheat, not oats, dear. I’m afraid
if it’s wheat it’s none of your sowing,
nevertheless I’d like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.
I’ll leave you with this thought.
No, I won’t. It would not be fair.
When we meet
in the midnight hour
country girl
I will bring you night flowers
coloured like your eyes
in the moonlight
in the midnight
hour
I remember
Your cold hand
held for a moment among strangers
held for a moment among dripping trees
in the midnight hour
I remember
Your eyes coloured like the autumn landscape
walking down muddy lanes
watching sheep eating yellow roses
walking in city squares in winter rain
kissing in darkened hallways
walking in empty suburban streets
saying goodnight in deserted alleyways
in the midnight hour
Andy Williams singing `We’ll keep a Welcome in the
Hillsides’ for us
When I meet you at the station
The Beatles singing `We Can Work it Out’ with James
Ensor at the harmonium
Rita Hayworth in a nightclub singing `Arcade Mia’
I will send you armadas
of love vast argosies of flowers
in the midnight hour
country girl
when we meet
in the moonlight
midnight
hour
country girl
I will bring you
yellow
white
eyes
bright
moon
light
mid
night
flowers
in the midnight hour.
Luke Kennard: The dusty era
(hey also check me out in the background skulking)
Hi. Kevin. London. Do a PhD at Goldsmiths. English lit. Work in the Oxfam shop in Dalston.
Things I tumbl include: words comics food.
I blog here I twitter here
“The poems you read—what were they about?” she asked, after a long...
In the absence of specifics, my advice is to eat more carbs.
Grape-Nuts, molasses, and whole...
