When I Talk a Poem, I Expect It to Talk Back

Lying here with E. resting by my side, patient but at ease; she will not sleep till I sleep. Here I lie working the net, confirming that old memories actually are links to poems and not a kind of memory hash now turned into something too attenuated to profitably remember.

(By profit I mean I can *find* the bastards. *There* you are, not exactly but close enough.)

I've had some good luck. I found something. What I am thinking is what kind of poem it is that I like, and that is one that I mostly understand.

Not all. That would be vulgar, even cheap. But mostly, with a fine last line that I could almost have written myself, at least in my imagination.

Philip Larkin, "Autumn"

The air deals blows: surely too hard, too often?
No: it is bent on bringing summer down.
Dead leaves desert in thousands, outwards, upwards,
Numerous as birds; but the birds fly away,

And the blows sound on, like distant collapsing water,
Or empty hospitals falling room by room
Down in the west, perhaps, where the angry light is.
Then rain starts; the year goes suddenly slack.

O rain, o frost, so much has still to be cleared:
All this ripeness, all this reproachful flesh,
And summer, that keeps returning like a ghost
Of something death has merely made beautiful,

And night skies so brilliantly spread-eagled
With their sharp hint of a journey--all must disperse
Before the season is lost and anonymous,
Like a London court one is never sure of finding

But none the less exists, at the back of the fog,
Bare earth, a lamp, scrapers. Then it will be time
To seek there that ill-favoured, curious house,
Bar up the door, mantle the fat flame,

And sit once more alone with sprawling papers,
Bitten-up letters, boxes of photographs,
And the case of butterflies so rich it looks
As if all summer settled there and died.

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