Layover
Layover - meaning Summary
A Pause in Living
Bukowski's poem contrasts a brief, sunlit act of love with the grubby, persistent world outside the hotel window. The lovers' intense moment becomes a compact memory that outlasts measured time. The speaker repeatedly passes the same hotel, observing poverty and wondering about absence and displacement. The poem frames life as intermittent pauses—"layovers"—when living halts, leaving the speaker to question where vitality goes when it stops.
Read Complete AnalysesMaking love in the sun, in the morning sun in a hotel room above the alley where poor men poke for bottles; making love in the sun making love by a carpet redder than our blood, making love while the boys sell headlines and Cadillacs, making love by a photograph of Paris and an open pack of Chesterfields, making love while other men- poor folks- work. That moment- to this. . . may be years in the way they measure, but it's only one sentence back in my mind- there are so many days when living stops and pulls up and sits and waits like a train on the rails. I pass the hotel at 8 and at 5; there are cats in the alleys and bottles and bums, and I look up at the window and think, I no longer know where you are, and I walk on and wonder where the living goes when it stops.
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