Thank you
In case my idiom doesn't stretch that far. the description "looks like the back of a bus" is not an unknown way for men to describe women, often that they don't even know - with that tone which implies that if the women don't attract them then the women have failed
Part of the events leading up to this poem was me wondering what some men in the bus might look like to some of the women they were commenting on as the bus passed them on the street
Thanks for the encouragement
L
-----Original Message-----
From: Stephen Vincent <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 5:39 PM
Subject: Re: snap - The back of a bus
I like this, Lawrence. It's spatially taut, solid and smart - the way, from
another perspective, I like Andrew Burke's piece end-up with the washing
machine and the boys. A clarity achieved by stilling both the image and the
poem.
Something I like in Lorca's still lifes and early Charles Simic - before he
began- it seems to me - writing parodies of his work ad infinitum.
Stephen V
http://stephenvincent.net/blog/
> The back of a bus
>
> One man, alone; and, behind and around,
> a jagged curve of five. All are in middle age:
> we are looking at the back of a bus. Noisy and full.
>
> None of them is really smart. But some look clean;
> and some have costly clothes quite rumpled.
> Each is at some distance from looking good.
>
> The one and the five are not all together.
> The five, unrulily jolly, sprawling and facetious,
> one-upping each other spatially and with gesture;
>
> the solitary man, like a worm repulsed by heat,
> recoils from stale clothes borne tobacco smoke
> in a closed warm container full of bad breath.
>
> It's not important. Camaraderie of ritualised aggression
> keeps the curve constant, and the one apart.
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