third post!

So once again I am writing in the nick of time before the deadline. I had planned to post this before Rosh Hashanah started but sadly the seven (!) hours it took to get from Boston to New York obviated this possibility. Luckily though, that heinous amount of time on the Fung Wah bus gave me a good opportunity to write?

Anyway, here's yet another moody poem about dusk.


[untitled]



Sunset is a venial hour. The stoops
are slick and pink as hams
in crepusculo, and the passersby swing their hips
into the murk helplessly at evening.
Each day in autumn the night rears itself higher
to catch a new hour of light in its teeth
swallowing briefly, bloodily, into the happening dusk...

I am surprised by my own lusts as always.
In the new darkness my limbs are a stranger's.
The sudden clumsiness of those who pass is an appeal to grace,
Even the cars move like half-blind dogs
muzzling hesitantly down the dim
borderless alleys of a hundred cities...

I am stained by light with the millions
who grope through the bowels of my country,
with their mouths open O in unknowing submission
unknowing possession O of the fat
frail soul that haunts the street



--

Also a bonus poem! For a fun project on the bus I memorized Matthew Arnold's "On Dover Beach" - I bought 'The Portable Matthew Arnold' on the way to the bus station, to enjoy what my friend Spencer calls "cantankerous Victoriana." This is just a silly response to that and the biographical essay by Lionel Trilling at the beginning of the book...

Off rhymes ftw!



Love Poem to Matthew Arnold

They say you were an Oxford dandy
Sleek and droll as Tristram Shandy,
And though you mope down Dover beach
I'd gladly dare to eat your peach.
O dour, dire, lettered Arnold,
Meek, upright, and barely carnal,
I dreamt you stepped forth from the page.
(And all the rest is verbiage.)