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Best Famous Parking Lot Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Parking Lot poems. This is a select list of the best famous Parking Lot poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Parking Lot poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of parking lot poems.

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Written by David Berman | Create an image from this poem

The Moon

 A web of sewer, pipe, and wire connects each house to the others.
In 206 a dog sleeps by the stove where a small gas leak causes him to have visions; visions that are rooted in nothing but gas.
Next door, a man who has decided to buy a car part by part excitedly unpacks a wheel and an ashtray.
He arranges them every which way.
It’s really beginning to take shape.
Out the garage window he sees a group of ugly children enter the forest.
Their mouths look like coin slots.
A neighbor plays keyboards in a local cover band.
Preparing for an engagement at the high school prom, they pack their equipment in silence.
Last night they played the Police Academy Ball and all the officers slow-danced with target range silhouettes.
This year the theme for the prom is the Tetragrammaton.
A yellow Corsair sails through the disco parking lot and swaying palms presage the lot of young libertines.
Inside the car a young lady wears a corsage of bullet-sized rodents.
Her date, the handsome cornerback, stretches his talons over the molded steering wheel.
They park and walk into the lush starlit gardens behind the disco just as the band is striking up.
Their keen eyes and ears twitch.
The other couples look beautiful tonight.
They stroll around listening to the brilliant conversation.
The passionate speeches.
Clouds drift across the silverware.
There is red larkspur, blue gum, and ivy.
A boy kneels before his date.
And the moon, I forgot to mention the moon.


Written by Wendell Berry | Create an image from this poem

In A Motel Parking Lot Thinking Of Dr. Williams

 I.
The poem is important, but not more than the people whose survival it serves, one of the necessities, so they may speak what is true, and have the patience for beauty: the weighted grainfield, the shady street, the well-laid stone and the changing tree whose branches spread above.
For want of songs and stories they have dug away the soil, paved over what is left, set up their perfunctory walls in tribute to no god, for the love of no man or woman, so that the good that was here cannot be called back except by long waiting, by great sorrows remembered and to come by invoking the thunderstones of the world, and the vivid air.
II.
The poem is important, as the want of it proves.
It is the stewardship of its own possibility, the past remembering itself in the presence of the present, the power learned and handed down to see what is present and what is not: the pavement laid down and walked over regardlessly--by exiles, here only because they are passing.
Oh, remember the oaks that were here, the leaves, purple and brown, falling, the nuthatches walking headfirst down the trunks, crying "onc! onc!" in the brightness as they are doing now in the cemetery across the street where the past and the dead keep each other.
To remember, to hear and remember, is to stop and walk on again to a livelier, surer measure.
It is dangerous to remember the past only for its own sake, dangerous to deliver a message you did not get.
Written by Mark Doty | Create an image from this poem

Demolition

 The intact facade's now almost black 
in the rain; all day they've torn at the back 
of the building, "the oldest concrete structure 
in New England," the newspaper said.
By afternoon, when the backhoe claw appears above three stories of columns and cornices, the crowd beneath their massed umbrellas cheer.
Suddenly the stairs seem to climb down themselves, atomized plaster billowing: dust of 1907's rooming house, this year's bake shop and florist's, the ghosts of their signs faint above the windows lined, last week, with loaves and blooms.
We love disasters that have nothing to do with us: the metal scoop seems shy, tentative, a Japanese monster tilting its yellow head and considering what to topple next.
It's a weekday, and those of us with the leisure to watch are out of work, unemployable or academics, joined by a thirst for watching something fall.
All summer, at loose ends, I've read biographies, Wilde and Robert Lowell, and fallen asleep over a fallen hero lurching down a Paris boulevard, talking his way to dinner or a drink, unable to forget the vain and stupid boy he allowed to ruin him.
And I dreamed I was Lowell, in a manic flight of failing and ruthless energy, and understood how wrong I was with a passionate exactitude which had to be like his.
A month ago, at Saint-Gauden's house, we ran from a startling downpour into coincidence: under a loggia built for performances on the lawn hulked Shaw's monument, splendid in its plaster maquette, the ramrod-straight colonel high above his black troops.
We crouched on wet gravel and waited out the squall; the hieratic woman -- a wingless angel? -- floating horizontally above the soldiers, her robe billowing like plaster dust, seemed so far above us, another century's allegorical decor, an afterthought who'd never descend to the purely physical soldiers, the nearly breathing bronze ranks crushed into a terrible compression of perspective, as if the world hurried them into the ditch.
"The unreadable," Wilde said, "is what occurs.
" And when the brutish metal rears above the wall of unglazed windows -- where, in a week, the kids will skateboard in their lovely loops and spray their indecipherable ideograms across the parking lot -- the single standing wall seems Roman, momentarily, an aqueduct, all that's left of something difficult to understand now, something Oscar and Bosie might have posed before, for a photograph.
Aqueducts and angels, here on Main, seem merely souvenirs; the gaps where the windows opened once into transients' rooms are pure sky.
It's strange how much more beautiful the sky is to us when it's framed by these columned openings someone meant us to take for stone.
The enormous, articulate shovel nudges the highest row of moldings and the whole thing wavers as though we'd dreamed it, our black classic, and it topples all at once.
Written by Charles Bukowski | Create an image from this poem

40000

 at the track today,
Father's Day,
each paid admission was
entitled to a wallet
and each contained a
little surprise.
most of the men seemed between 30 and 55, going to fat, many of them in walking shorts, they had gone stale in life, flattened out.
.
.
.
in fact, damn it, they aren't even worth writing about! why am I doing this? these don't even deserve a death bed, these little walking whales, only there are so many of them, in the urinals, in the food lines, they have managed to survive in a most limited sense but when you see so many of them like that, there and not there, breathing, farting, commenting, waiting for a thunder that will not arrive, waiting for the charging white horse of Glory, waiting for the lovely female that is not there, waiting to WIN, waiting for the great dream to engulf them but they do nothing, they clomp in their sandals, gnaw at hot dogs dog style, gulping at the meat, they complain about losing, blame the jocks, drink green beer, the parking lot is jammed with their unpaid for cars, the jocks mount again for another race, the men press toward the betting windows mesmerized, fathers and non-fathers Monday is waiting for them, this is the last big lark.
and the horses are totally beautiful.
it is shocking how beautiful they are at that time, at that place, their life shines through; miracles happen, even in hell.
I decide to stay for one more race.
from Transit magazine, 1994
Written by Amy Clampitt | Create an image from this poem

Salvage

 Daily the cortege of crumpled 
defunct cars 
goes by by the lasagna-
layered flatbed 
truckload: hardtop 

reverting to tar smudge,
wax shine antiqued to crusted 
winepress smear, 
windshield battered to
intact ice-tint, a rarity

fresh from the Pleistocene.
I like it; privately I find esthetic satisfaction in these ceremonial removals from the category of received ideas to regions where pigeons' svelte smoke-velvet limousines, taxiing in whirligigs, reclaim a parking lot, and the bag-laden hermit woman, disencumbered of a greater incubus, the crush of unexamined attitudes, stoutly follows her routine, mining the mountainsides of our daily refuse for artifacts: subversive re-establishing with each arcane trash-basket dig the pleasures of the ruined.