in the eyes of even the most staid poems written by the most staid poets...
A.E. Housman can still give the day a kick in its nuts sometimes. Go, dead man, go!
"Oh, when I was in love with you..."
Oh, when I was in love with you,
Then I was clean and brave,
And miles around the wonder grew
How well I did behave.
And now the fancy passes by,
And nothing will remain.
And miles around they'll say that I
Am quite myself again.
This is from that anthology of Love Poems I'm examining poem by poem. So many years since I read this one!
But score one for the anthologist.
No lean on that bone, dude.
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OBAMA VALENTINE
And there’s Sidney Poitier on the bulldozer
or carrying in a box of groceries or angry
at a white woman ‘I’m through feeling small’
‘you get yourself another boy’
in the sense that not to be someone’s ‘boy’
is the true pivot of American sublimity
exceptionalistically speaking
so when I look at Obama (and who today
isn’t?) I see Sidney’s traveling architect
Homer Smith again in ancient 1963
the modern fairy tale beginning wherein
color is never referenced as a problem
and that last shot of him
driving away proud free and smiling.
"in the sense that not to be someone’s ‘boy’
is the true pivot of American sublimity"
That's heterosexuality, Peter.
Homosexuality is the opposite.
It's the fifty-nine year old wearing the baseball cap with BOY on it.
In silver. Wait, it's mirror glass!
Peter Pan has a mean left hook when he's drunk. Watch out.
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