9.18.2010

slice of life

So. I’ve been really into poetry lately, and I’ve just recently discovered this phenomenal poet named Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Take a bite of this slice of life…

Poem #8 from “A Coney Island of the Mind.”

In Golden Gate Park that day
A man ahd his wife were coming along
Thru the enormous meadow
Which was the meadow of the world
He was wearing green suspenders
And carrying an old beat-up flute
In one hand
While his wife had a bunch of grapes
Which she kept handing out
Individually
To various squirrels
As if each
Were a little joke.
And then the two of them came on
Thru the enormous meadow
Which was the meadow of the world
And then
At a very still spot where the trees dreamed
And seemed to have been waiting thru all time
For them
They sat down together on the grass
Without looking at eachother
Ate and oranges
Without looking at each other
And put the peels
In a basket which they seemed
To have brought for that purpose
Without looking at each other
And then
He took his shirt and undershirt off
But kept his hat on
Sideways
And without saying anything
Fell asleep under it
And his wife just sat there looking
At the birds which flew about
Calling to eachother
In the stilly air
As if they were questioning existence
Or trying to recall something forgotten
But then finally
She too lay down flat
And just lay there looking up
At nothing
Yet fingering the old flute which nobody played
And finally looking over
At him
Without any particular expression
Except a certain awful look
Of terrible depression.

And another one. Ironically also titled #8 taken from “Pictures of the Gone World”

It was a face which darkness could kill
In an instant
A face as easily hurt
By laughter or light
“We think differently at night”
She told me once
Lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
“I feel there is an angel in me” she’d say
“Whom I’m constantly shocking”
Then she would smile and look away
Light a cigarette for me
Sigh and rise
And stretch
Her sweet anatomy
Let fall a stocking.

One last one. Poem #1, also from “Pictures of the Gone World.”

Away above a harborful
Of caulkless houses
Among the charley noble chimneypots
Of a rooftop rigged with clotheslines
A woman pastes up sails
Upon the wind
Hanging out her morning sheets
With wooden pins
O lovely mammal
Her nearly naked teats
Throw taut shadows
When she stretches up
To hang at last the last of her
So white washed sins
But it is wetly amorous
And winds itself about her
Clinging to her skin
So caught with arms upraised
She tosses back her head
In voiceless laughter
And in choiceless gesture then
Shakes out gold hair
While in the reachless seascape spaces
Between the blown white shrouds
Stand out the bright steamers
To kingdom come.

Anyway, those have been a few of my favorite. Check him out if you like what you see. Goodness he’s great.