June 11

It's my birthday I've got an empty
stomach and the desire to be
lazy in the hammock and maybe
go for a cool swim on a hot day
with the trombone in Sinatra's
"I've Got You Under My Skin"
in my head and then to break for
lunch a corned-beef sandwich and Pepsi
with plenty of ice cubes unlike France
where they put one measly ice cube
in your expensive Coke and when
you ask for more they argue with
you they say this way you get more
Coke for the money showing they
completely misunderstand the nature of
American soft drinks which are an
excuse for ice cubes still I wouldn't
mind being there for a couple of
days Philip Larkin's attitude
toward China comes to mind when
asked if he'd like to go there he said
yes if he could return the same day


David Lehman


This is poem 76 from the Library of Congress Poetry 180 project, and I saw a comment about the lack of punctuation, which made me look at this more closely.

Poets pay attention to every aspect of language, including punctuation, and any time a poet abandons punctuation it's a good idea to assume he or she did this for a reason. Often that reason is to indicate excitement (Stevie Smith's "Not Waving but Drowning"), stream of consciousness, etc.

This poem seems to me pretty clearly a stream-of-consciousness meditation on the subject of birthdays, and the feeling I get from it is inchoate longing (emptiness) and desire, particularly the poet's desire to return to a comfortable past - the past of lazy hammocks, cool swims, old songs, and comfort food.

Whenever a specific song is mentioned in a poem, it's a good idea to check out the lyrics. "I've Got You Under My Skin" is a Cole Porter classic, of course, and the part just after the trombone solo has these memorable lines: "Why not use your mentality/ Get up, wake up to reality?"

Then those sudden thoughts about being in a foreign country, feeling vaguely cheated  (one measly ice cube) and misunderstood, and bringing in another poet, Larkin, to express the idea that travel is all well and good, but most of the time we would rather be comfortably at home.

Overall, this seems like a meditation on mortality and on the discomfort of being forced to travel ever farther into an increasingly foreign land (away from our past). But a low-key meditation, appropriate for musing in a hammock.

Then again, maybe not.