If I had a superpower I would like it to be the ability to stay awake during the dvd and stay asleep in bed.   Since i have clearly lucked out on that one, here I am with my book of New York poetry after having played away all my lives on Candy Crush and finished the Graham Nash autobiography.   37 minutes until Out of Doors and a  justifiable big pot of tea.

The below is by Charles Tomlinson, who turned out to be a Brit abroad.

All Afternoon

All afternoon the shadows have been building

A city of their own within the streets,

Carefully correcting the perspectives

With dark diagonals, and paring back

Sidewalks into catwalks, strips of bright

Companionways, as if it were a ship

This counter-city.  But the leaning, black

Enjambements like ladders for assault

Scale the façades and tie them to the earth,

Confounding fire-escapes already meshed

In slatted ambiguities.  You touch

The sliding shapes to find which place is which

And grime a finger with the ash of time

That blows through both, the shadow in the shade

And in the light, that scours out each thoroughfare

To pit the walls, rise out of yard and stairwell

And tarnish the Chrysler’s Aztec pinnacle.

Poems of New York, 2002

Enjambement is the term given to the poetic device of creating tension, where the meaning runs-over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation.   You would think I would know that already, but I must have been off that day.   I always just called it running off the line.

Anyway, it’s a darn good excuse for one more picture from our hotel window last September.