Arrival

Portrait of Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin 1922–1985

Morning, a glass door, flashes Gold names off the new city, Whose white shelves and domes travel The slow sky all day. I land to stay here; And the windows flock open And the curtains fly out like doves And a past dries in a wind.

Now let me lie down, under A wide-branched indifference, Shovel-faces like pennies Down the back of the mind, Find voices coined to An argot of motor-horns, And let the cluttered-up houses Keep their thick lives to themselves.

For this ignorance of me Seems a kind of innocence. Fast enough I shall wound it: Let me breathe till then Its milk-aired Eden, Till my own life impound it- Slow-falling; grey-veil-hung; a theft, A style of dying only.

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