London Crossfigured

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti b. 1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti

London

crossfigured

creeping with trams

and the artists on sundays

in the summer

all ‘tracking Nature’

in the suburbs

could have been anyplace

but it wasn’t

It was

London

and when someone shouted over

that they had got a model

I ran out across the court

but then

when the model started taking off

her clothes

there was nothing underneath

I mean to say

she took off her shoes

and found no feet

took off her top

and found no tit

under it

and I must say she did look

a bit

ASTOUNDED

just standing there

looking down

at where her legs were

not

But so very carefully then

she put her clothes back on

and as soon as she was dressed again

completely

she was completely

all right

Do it again! cried someone

rushing for his easel

But she was afraid to

and gave up modelling

and forever after

slept in her clothes

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “London Crossfigured” from These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems. Copyright © 1955 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Source: These Are My Rivers: New and Selected Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1993)

Biography

As poet, playwright, publisher, and activist, Lawrence Ferlinghetti helped to spark the San Francisco literary renaissance of the 1950s and the subsequent “Beat” movement. Like the Beats, Ferlinghetti felt strongly that art should be accessible to all people, not just a handful of highly educated intellectuals. His career has been marked by its constant challenge of the status quo; his poetry engages readers, defies popular . . .

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