afieldnotebook

Essential Beauty

In frames as large as rooms that face all ways
And block the ends of streets with giant loaves,
Screen graves with custard, cover slums with praise
Of motor-oil and cuts of salmon, shine
Perpetually these sharply-pictured groves
Of how life should be. High above the gutter
A silver knife sinks into golden butter,
A glass of milk stands in a meadow, and
Well-balanced families, in fine
Midsummer weather, owe their smiles, their cars,
Even their youth, to that small cube each hand
Stretches towards. These, and the deep armchairs
Aligned to cups at bedtime, radiant bars
(Gas or electric), quarter-profile cats
By slippers on warm mats,
Reflect none of the rained-on streets and squares

They dominate outdoors. Rather, they rise
Serenely to proclaim pure crust, pure foam,
Pure coldness to our live imperfect eyes
That stare beyond this world, where nothing's made
As new or washed quite clean, seeking the home
All such inhabit. There, dark raftered pubs
Are filled with white-clothed ones from tennis-clubs,
And the boy puking his heart out in the Gents
Just missed them, as the pensioner paid
A halfpenny more for Granny Graveclothes' Tea
To taste old age, and dying smokers sense
Walking towards them through some dappled park
As if on water that unfocused she
No match lit up, nor drag ever brought near,
Who now stands newly clear,
Smiling, and recognizing, and going dark.

-Philip Larkin

This is where I live now: in a valley where I don't get cell phone service, at the end of a long dirt road that has been deeply eroded, in a house built for an artist who spent half his time in Paris and bought by Nathaniel Hawthorne's great-grandson in the 1970s.

I should probably note that I never know what I'm going to get when it comes to housing--it's always a gamble. You can get a glimpse of where I was living previously here, but the short of it is that I was living in a trailer home (singlewide). And now I'm living in a questionably-constructed log cabin that looks like it was decorated by someone's grandmother, complete with afghans. But we have an extra room. Come visit.