After Spinny's reminder that not everyone is obsessed with the current festival of chess on grass and Dickley Head's post from yesterday, I thought, 'what better way to prepare for tomorrow's encounter with one 'Big Phil' than to do something on the other, rather more poetic one?' Tenuous? Perhaps, but what did you expect from a man with nothing interesting to say? Cheap porn? (I know, I know - we all miss the smut but like the poet said, all good things must come to an end....)
I had promised (to someone in their comments section, forget who) to post the chapter about Larkin from my dissertation A Brilliant Breaking of the Bank: Contending Englands in post war British Culture (you couldn't make it up, could you?), but alas and alack, I can't find it in digital form - so that particular pleasure will have to wait (...sound of mass migration from the UK to obscure regions of the planet currently without internet access...) Well, it IS meant to be a comedy site...
Until then, here's one of Big Phil's biggest hits. 'Sad steps' from the L.P. High Windows...
Groping back to bed after a piss
I part the thick curtains, and am startled by
The rapid clouds, the moon's cleanliness.
Four o'clock: wedge-shaped gardens lie
Under a cavernous, a wind-pierced sky.
There's something laughable about this,
The way the moon dashes through the clouds that blow
Loosely as cannon-smoke to stand apart
(Stone-coloured light sharpening the roofs below)
High and preposterous and separate--
Lozenge of love! Medallion of art!
O wolves of memory! Immensements! No,
One shivers slightly, looking up there.
The hardness and the brightness and the plain
far-reaching singleness of that wide stare
Is a reminder of the strength and pain
Of being young; that it can't come again,
But is for others undiminished somewhere.
© 2006 Swipe Enterprises
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