Wrist Deep

Lines on a Young Lady’s Photograph Album

At last you yielded up the album, which,

Once open, sent me distracted. All your ages

Matt and glossy on the thick black pages!

Too much confectionery, too rich:

I choke on such nutritious images.

My swivel eye hungers from pose to pose –

In pigtails, clutching a reluctant cat;

Or furred yourself, a sweet girl-graduate;

Or lifting a heavy-headed rose

Beneath a trellis, or in a trilby hat

(Faintly disturbing, that, in several ways) –

From every side you strike at my control,

Not least through these disquieting chaps who loll

At ease about your earlier days:

Not quite your class, I’d say, dear, on the whole.

But o, photography! as no art is,

Faithful and disappointing! that records

Dull days as dull, and hot-it smiles as frauds,

And will not censor blemishes

Like washing-lines, and Hall’s-Distemper boards,

But shows the cat as disinclined, and shades

A chin as doubled when it is, what grace

Your candour thus confers upon her face!

How overwhelmingly persuades

That this is a real girl in a real place,

In every sense empirically true!

Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,

These misty parks and motors, lacerate

Simply by being over; you

Contract my heart by looking out of date.

Yes, true; but in the end, surely, we cry

Not only at exclusion, but because

It leaves us free to cry. We know what was

Won’t call on us to justify

Our grief, however hard we yowl across

The gap from eye to page. So I am left

To mourn (without a chance of consequence)

You, balanced on a bike against a fence;

To wonder if you’d spot the theft

Of this one of you bathing; to condense,

In short, a past that no one now can share,

No matter whose your future; calm and dry,

It holds you like a heaven, and you lie

Unvariably lovely there,

Smaller and clearer as the years go by.

-Philip Larkin