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diff --git a/old/60044-h/60044-h.htm b/old/60044-h/60044-h.htm deleted file mode 100644 index 20eca41..0000000 --- a/old/60044-h/60044-h.htm +++ /dev/null @@ -1,3110 +0,0 @@ -<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" - "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> -<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> - <head> - <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /> - <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" /> - <title> - The Project Gutenberg eBook of Against This Age, by Maxwell Bodenheim. - </title> -<link rel="coverpage" href="images/cover.jpg" /> - <style type="text/css"> - -body { - margin-left: 10%; - margin-right: 10%; -} - - h1,h2 { - text-align: center; - clear: both; -} - -p { - margin-top: .51em; - text-align: justify; - margin-bottom: .49em; -} - -.xxlarge {font-size: 175%;} -.large {font-size: 125%;} - -div.chapter {page-break-before: always;} -h2.nobreak {page-break-before: avoid;} - -div.titlepage {text-align: center; page-break-before: always; page-break-after: always;} -div.titlepage p {text-align: center; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.5; margin-top: 2em;} - -hr { - width: 33%; - margin-top: 2em; - margin-bottom: 2em; - margin-left: 33.5%; - margin-right: 33.5%; - clear: both; -} - -hr.chap {width: 65%; margin-left: 17.5%; margin-right: 17.5%;} -hr.tb {width: 45%; margin-left: 27.5%; margin-right: 27.5%;} - - - -table { - margin-left: auto; - margin-right: auto; -} - - - .tdr {text-align: right;} - -.pagenum { - position: absolute; - left: 92%; - font-size: smaller; - text-align: right; -} - - - - -.ph1 {text-align: center; font-size: xx-large; font-weight: bold;} -.ph2 {text-align: center; font-size: large; font-weight: bold;} -.center {text-align: center;} - - -.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} - - - -.figcenter { - margin: auto; - text-align: center; -} - - -.footnote {margin-left: 15em; font-size: 0.9em;} - -.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 75%; text-align: right;} - -.fnanchor { - vertical-align: super; - font-size: .8em; - text-decoration: - none; -} - -.poetry-container {text-align: center;} -.poetry {display: inline-block; text-align: left;} -.poetry .verse {text-indent: -2.5em; padding-left: 3em;} -.poetry .stanza {margin: 1em auto;} -.poetry .verse2 {text-indent: -3.5em; padding-left: 3em;} - - - - -.transnote {background-color: #E6E6FA; - color: black; - font-size:smaller; - padding:0.5em; - margin-bottom:5em; - font-family:sans-serif, serif; } - </style> - </head> -<body> - - -<pre> - -The Project Gutenberg EBook of Against This Age, by Maxwell Bodenheim - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with -almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or -re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included -with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license - - -Title: Against This Age - -Author: Maxwell Bodenheim - -Release Date: August 3, 2019 [EBook #60044] - -Language: English - -Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 - -*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGAINST THIS AGE *** - - - - -Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. Brown, and the Online -Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This -book was produced from images made available by the -HathiTrust Digital Library.) - - - - - - -</pre> - - - -<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/cover.jpg" alt="" /></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - -<h1>AGAINST THIS AGE</h1> - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_title.jpg" alt="" /></div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<div class="titlepage"> -<p><span class="xxlarge">AGAINST THIS AGE</span></p> - -<p><span class="large">MAXWELL BODENHEIM</span></p> - -<div class="figcenter"><img src="images/i_titlelogo.jpg" alt="" /></div> - -<p><span class="large">BONI AND LIVERIGHT</span><br /> -PUBLISHERS : : NEW YORK</p> -</div> - -<hr class="tb" /> - -<p class="center">COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY<br /> -BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.<br /> -<br /> -<br /> -PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - -<p class="center">To<br /> -<span class="large">FEDYA AND MINNA</span><br /> -FOUR EYES WITHIN A BLIND WORLD</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - -<p class="center">Some of the poems in this book have appeared in<br /> -<i>The Century</i>, <i>The Bookman</i>, <i>The Nation</i>, <i>The Dial</i>,<br /> -<i>The Menorah Journal</i>, <i>Broom</i>, <i>The Double Dealer</i>,<br /> -<i>Shadowland</i>, and <i>Harper’s Magazine</i>.</p> -<hr class="chap" /> - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_7" id="Page_7">[7]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">CONTENTS</h2></div> - - -<table border="0" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" summary="table"> - - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Baby</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_11">11</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Nightmare and Something Delicate</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_13"> 13</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Regarding an American Village</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_22"> 22</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Three Portraits</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_25"> 25</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Definitions</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_28"> 28</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">To a Corpulent Singer</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_29"> 29</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Topsy-Turvy</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_30"> 30</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Revile the Acrobat</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_32"> 32</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Compulsory Tasks</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_34"> 34</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Rhymed Conversation with Money</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_36"> 36</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Highly Deliberate Poem</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_38"> 38</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Poem</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_40"> 40</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Realistic Creator</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_41"> 41</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">City Streets</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_42"> 42</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Decadent Cry</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_43"> 43</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Girl</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_44"> 44</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Color and a Woman</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_46"> 46</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Reluctant Lady</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_48"> 48</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Psychology from Mars</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_49"> 49</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">To Time</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_51"> 51</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Decadent Duet</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_52"> 52</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Poem to a Policeman</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_54"> 54</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Intimate Scene</span></td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_56"> 56</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">New York City</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_58"> 58</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">We Want Lyrics</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_60"> 60</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">A Visitor from Mars Smiles</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_62"> 62</a></td></tr> - -<tr><td><span class="smcap">Surprise</span> </td><td class="tdr"><a href="#Page_63"> 63</a></td></tr> -</table> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_8" id="Page_8">[8]</a></span></p> -<hr class="chap" /> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_9" id="Page_9">[9]</a></span></p> - - - -<p class="ph1">AGAINST THIS AGE</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_10" id="Page_10">[10]</a></span></p> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_11" id="Page_11">[11]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">BABY</h2></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="center">1</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">T</span>he blue beginning of your eyes</div> -<div class="verse">Condenses the sprawling and assured</div> -<div class="verse">Blue with which the sky retreats</div> -<div class="verse">From those obscene confessions known as days.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="center">2</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Again, your battling mites of blue</div> -<div class="verse">Try to stop the revolving monster of life</div> -<div class="verse">And find the indelible persuasiveness</div> -<div class="verse">Of single forms within the circling blur.</div> -<div class="verse">Sundered bits of a soul</div> -<div class="verse">Astonished at their shrunken estate,</div> -<div class="verse">They are not sure that they have still survived,</div> -<div class="verse">And plead for the conviction of sight.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="center">3</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">But when they recollect</div> -<div class="verse">The hugely placid manners</div> -<div class="verse">Of their life, before the earthly exile</div> -<div class="verse">Made them small and fastened</div> -<div class="verse">To one pathetic puzzle,</div> -<div class="verse">Their blue reverts to swelling reveries</div> -<div class="verse">Whose outward circles spurn the curtained jail.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_12" id="Page_12">[12]</a></span> - - -<div class="center">4</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Upon your softly incomplete</div> -<div class="verse">Face, where germs of devils stir in curves</div> -<div class="verse">That tremble into questioning symmetries,</div> -<div class="verse">A thrust of darkness sometimes interferes</div> -<div class="verse">With secret, virgin places underneath</div> -<div class="verse">Your eyes and where your leaf-thin nostrils pause.</div> -<div class="verse">This darkness bends with helpless messages,</div> -<div class="verse">Like history admonishing a world</div> -<div class="verse">Personified in one, composite face.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_13" id="Page_13">[13]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING -DELICATE</h2></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - - -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">Y</span>ou mutter, with your face</div> -<div class="verse">Pleading for more room because</div> -<div class="verse">It has scanned a panorama:</div> -<div class="verse">You mutter, with every difference</div> -<div class="verse">On your face an error in size</div> -<div class="verse">Mesmerized by the sight of a sky-line:</div> -<div class="verse">“Life is a nightmare and something delicate.”</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, they have made a world for you,</div> -<div class="verse">And if you dare to leave it</div> -<div class="verse">They will flagellate you</div> -<div class="verse">With the bones of dead men’s thoughts,</div> -<div class="verse">And five senses, five termagants</div> -<div class="verse">Snapping at the uneasy mind.</div> -<div class="verse">“No, five riotous flirts,”</div> -<div class="verse">You say, “and each one has</div> -<div class="verse">A thick blandishment to master the mind.”</div> -<div class="verse">Yes, lady, through the bold disarrangement of words</div> -<div class="verse">Life acquires with great foresight</div> -<div class="verse">An interesting nervousness.</div> -<div class="verse">But O lady with a decadent music</div> -<div class="verse">Somehow silent in lines of flesh,</div> -<div class="verse">Finding your face too small,</div> -<div class="verse">Finding the earth too small,</div> -<div class="verse">Have they not informed you</div> -<div class="verse">That crowding life into seven words</div> -<div class="verse">Is an insincere and minor epigram?</div> -<div class="verse">And have they not reprimanded you</div> -<div class="verse">Because you fail to observe</div> -<div class="verse">Their vile and fervent spontaneity,</div> -<div class="verse">These howlers of earthly shrouds?</div> -<div class="verse">And have they neglected to drive</div> -<div class="verse">The bluster of their knuckles against your face</div> -<div class="verse">Because you rush from the leg and arm<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_14" id="Page_14">[14]</a></span></div> -<div class="verse">Anecdotes of microscopical towns,</div> -<div class="verse">Bandying with a fantasy</div> -<div class="verse">Which they call thin and valueless?</div> -<div class="verse">“Life is a nightmare and something delicate,”</div> -<div class="verse">You repeat, and then, “O yes, they have done these things</div> -<div class="verse">To me because I take not seriously</div> -<div class="verse">The interval between two steps</div> -<div class="verse">Made by Death, who has grown a little tired.</div> -<div class="verse">When Death recovers his vigor</div> -<div class="verse">The intervals will become</div> -<div class="verse">Shorter and shorter until</div> -<div class="verse">No more men are alive.</div> -<div class="verse">But now they have their chance.</div> -<div class="verse">The wild, foul fight of life</div> -<div class="verse">Delights in refreshing phrases—</div> -<div class="verse">Swift-pouring tranquillities and ecstasies</div> -<div class="verse">Atoning for the groaning stampede</div> -<div class="verse">That desecrates the light</div> -<div class="verse">Between each dawn and twilight.</div> -<div class="verse">And those who stand apart</div> -<div class="verse">Use the edged art of their minds</div> -<div class="verse">To cut the struggling pack of bodies</div> -<div class="verse">Into naked, soiled distinctness.”</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, do not let them hear you.</div> -<div class="verse">You are too delicate—</div> -<div class="verse">Deliberately, nimbly, remotely, strongly</div> -<div class="verse">Delicate—and you will remind them</div> -<div class="verse">Too much of Death, who is also</div> -<div class="verse">The swiftly fantastic compression</div> -<div class="verse">Of every adjective and adverb</div> -<div class="verse">Marching to nouns that live</div> -<div class="verse">Beyond the intentions of men.</div> -<div class="verse">Men are not able, lady,</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_15" id="Page_15">[15]</a></span>To strike his face, and in vengeance</div> -<div class="verse">They will smear your face</div> -<div class="verse">With the loose, long hatred of their words.</div> -<div class="verse">I will wash your face</div> -<div class="verse">With new metaphors and similes,</div> -<div class="verse">Telling carefully with my hands</div> -<div class="verse">That I love you not for your skin,</div> -<div class="verse">And every bird at twilight</div> -<div class="verse">Will be enviously astonished</div> -<div class="verse">At your face now insubstantial</div> -<div class="verse">Indeed, you have an irony</div> -<div class="verse">That ironically doubts</div> -<div class="verse">Whether its power is supreme,</div> -<div class="verse">And at such times you accept</div> -<div class="verse">The adequate distraction</div> -<div class="verse">Of cold and shifting fantasy.</div> -<div class="verse">This is your mood and mine,</div> -<div class="verse">And with it we open the window</div> -<div class="verse">To look upon the night.</div> -<div class="verse">The night, with distinguished coherence,</div> -<div class="verse">Is saying yes to the soul</div> -<div class="verse">And mending its velvet integrity</div> -<div class="verse">Torn by one forlorn</div> -<div class="verse">Animal that bounds</div> -<div class="verse">From towns and villages.</div> -<div class="verse">The night is Blake in combat</div> -<div class="verse">With an extraordinary wolf</div> -<div class="verse">Whose head can take the mobile</div> -<div class="verse">Protection of a smile;</div> -<div class="verse">Whose heart contains the ferocious</div> -<div class="verse">Lies of ice and fire;</div> -<div class="verse">Whose heart with stiff and sinuous</div> -<div class="verse">Promises swindles the lips and limbs of men;</div> -<div class="verse">Whose heart persuades its confusion</div> -<div class="verse">To welcome the martyred certainties</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_16" id="Page_16">[16]</a></span>Of cruelty and kindness;</div> -<div class="verse">Whose brain is but a calmness</div> -<div class="verse">Where the falsehoods of earth</div> -<div class="verse">Can fashion masks of ideas.</div> -<div class="verse">Welcome the wolf.</div> -<div class="verse">Bring lyrics to fondle his hair.</div> -<div class="verse">Summon your troops of words</div> -<div class="verse">And exalt his gasping contortions.</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, it is my fear</div> -<div class="verse">That makes me give you these commands.</div> -<div class="verse">Men will force upon you</div> -<div class="verse">The garland of their spit</div> -<div class="verse">If you fail to glorify,</div> -<div class="verse">Or eagerly disrobe,</div> -<div class="verse">The overbearing motives of their flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">And every irony of yours</div> -<div class="verse">Will be despised unless</div> -<div class="verse">A hand of specious warmth</div> -<div class="verse">Directs the twist of your blades.</div> -<div class="verse">O lady, you are flashing detachment</div> -<div class="verse">Clad in exquisitely careful</div> -<div class="verse">Fantasy, and on your face</div> -<div class="verse">Pity and irony unite</div> -<div class="verse">To form the nimble light of contemplations.</div> -<div class="verse">Men will dread you as they fear</div> -<div class="verse">Death, the Ultimate Preciosity.</div> -<div class="verse">Stay with me within this chamber</div> -<div class="verse">And tell me that your heart</div> -<div class="verse">Is near to a spiral of pain</div> -<div class="verse">Curving perfectly</div> -<div class="verse">From the squirming of a world.</div> -<div class="verse">See, you have made me luminous</div> -<div class="verse">With this news, and my heart,</div> -<div class="verse">Fighting to be original,</div> -<div class="verse">Ends its struggle in yours.</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_17" id="Page_17">[17]</a></span>Turning, we trace a crescent</div> -<div class="verse">Of conscious imagination</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the darkness of this room.</div> -<div class="verse">Night and window still remain.</div> -<div class="verse">Night, spiritual acrobat,</div> -<div class="verse">Evades with great undulations</div> -<div class="verse">The moans and exultations of men.</div> -<div class="verse">His madly elastic invitation</div> -<div class="verse">To the souls of men</div> -<div class="verse">Gathers up the imagination</div> -<div class="verse">Of one poet, starving in a room</div> -<div class="verse">Where rats and scandals ravish the light.</div> -<div class="verse">With conscious combinations of words</div> -<div class="verse">The poet bounds through space with Night.</div> -<div class="verse">Together they observe</div> -<div class="verse">The bleeding, cheated mob</div> -<div class="verse">Of bodies robbed by one quick thrill.</div> -<div class="verse">Cold, exact, and fanciful,</div> -<div class="verse">They drop the new designs of words</div> -<div class="verse">Upon a vastly obvious contortion.</div> -<div class="verse">Poet and night can see</div> -<div class="verse">No difference between</div> -<div class="verse">The peasant, groveling and marred,</div> -<div class="verse">And smoother men who cringe more secretly.</div> -<div class="verse">Yet they give these men</div> -<div class="verse">The imaginary distinctions of words.</div> -<div class="verse">Compassionate poet and night.</div> -<div class="verse">You say: “With glaring details</div> -<div class="verse">Attended by the voices of men,</div> -<div class="verse">Morning will attack the poet.</div> -<div class="verse">Men will brandish adjectives.</div> -<div class="verse">Tenuous! Stilted! Artificial!</div> -<div class="verse">Dreams of warm permanence</div> -<div class="verse">Will grasp the little weapons</div> -<div class="verse">Furnished by the servant-mind.</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_18" id="Page_18">[18]</a></span>Dreams ... ah, lady, let us leave</div> -<div class="verse">The more precise and polished dream</div> -<div class="verse">Of our sadness, and surpass</div> -<div class="verse">The scoundrel, beggar, fool, and braggart</div> -<div class="verse">Fused into a loose convulsion</div> -<div class="verse">Called by men amusement.</div> -<div class="verse">Laughter is the explosive trouble</div> -<div class="verse">Of a soul that shakes the flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">Misunderstanding the signal</div> -<div class="verse">Men fly to an easy delight.</div> -<div class="verse">Causes, obscure and oppressed,</div> -<div class="verse">Cleave the flesh and become</div> -<div class="verse">Raped by earthly intentions.</div> -<div class="verse">Thus the surface rôles of men</div> -<div class="verse">Throw themselves upon the stranger,</div> -<div class="verse">Changing his cries with theirs.</div> -<div class="verse">The aftermath is a smile</div> -<div class="verse">Relishing the past occurrence.</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, since you desire</div> -<div class="verse">To clutch the meaning of this sound and pause,</div> -<div class="verse">Laugh and smile with me more sadly</div> -<div class="verse">And with that attenuated, cold</div> -<div class="verse">Courage never common to men.</div> -<div class="verse">Another window is behind us,</div> -<div class="verse">Needing much our laugh and smile.</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">II</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">That metaphysical prank</div> -<div class="verse">Known as chance—overwhelming</div> -<div class="verse">Lack of respect for bodies</div> -<div class="verse">And the position of objects—</div> -<div class="verse">Gathers three men and arranges them</div> -<div class="verse">Side by side in a street-car.</div> -<div class="verse">Freudian, poet, and priest—</div> -<div class="verse">Ah, lady, they have not lost</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_19" id="Page_19">[19]</a></span>The unreal snobbishness</div> -<div class="verse">With which their different minds</div> -<div class="verse">Withdraw from one another.</div> -<div class="verse">Their thought does not desire</div> -<div class="verse">Only to be distinct</div> -<div class="verse">And adventurous.</div> -<div class="verse">They must also maintain</div> -<div class="verse">An extreme aloofness;</div> -<div class="verse">Throw the obliterating adjective;</div> -<div class="verse">Fix a rock and perch upon it.</div> -<div class="verse">Chance, the irresistible humorist,</div> -<div class="verse">Has lured their bodies together,</div> -<div class="verse">With that purity of intention</div> -<div class="verse">Not appreciated by men.</div> -<div class="verse">With a smile not impersonal</div> -<div class="verse">But trampling on small disputes,</div> -<div class="verse">We scan the minds and hearts of these men.</div> -<div class="verse">The Freudian is meditating</div> -<div class="verse">Upon a page within his essay</div> -<div class="verse">Where the narrative sleep of a woman</div> -<div class="verse">Clarifies her limbs and breast.</div> -<div class="verse">He does not know that men</div> -<div class="verse">Within their sleep discover</div> -<div class="verse">Creative lips and eyes stamped out by life;</div> -<div class="verse">That coarse and drooling fish-peddlers</div> -<div class="verse">Change to Dostoyevskies;</div> -<div class="verse">Morbid morgue-attendants</div> -<div class="verse">Snatch the sight of Baudelaire;</div> -<div class="verse">Snarling, cloudy cut-throats</div> -<div class="verse">Steal the shape of François Villon.</div> -<div class="verse">Men within their slumber</div> -<div class="verse">Congratulate the poetry,</div> -<div class="verse">Prose, and art that life reviles</div> -<div class="verse">Within their stifled consciousness.</div> -<div class="verse">Their helpless imaginations</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_20" id="Page_20">[20]</a></span>Throw off the soiled and cramped</div> -<div class="verse">Weight of memorized realities.</div> -<div class="verse">The Freudian in the street-car</div> -<div class="verse">Ties this freedom to a creed,</div> -<div class="verse">Narrowing the broad escape</div> -<div class="verse">Until it fits the lunge of limbs.</div> -<div class="verse">We leave him, rubbing his nose</div> -<div class="verse">To catch the upheaval of triumph,</div> -<div class="verse">And look upon the more removed</div> -<div class="verse">Body of the poet.</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, poets heal</div> -<div class="verse">Their slashed and poisoned loneliness</div> -<div class="verse">With words that captivate</div> -<div class="verse">The bald, surrounding scene:</div> -<div class="verse">Words that grip the variations</div> -<div class="verse">Crowded underneath each outward form,</div> -<div class="verse">Governed by the scrutiny</div> -<div class="verse">Of mind, and heart, and soul.</div> -<div class="verse">Transcending the rattle of this car</div> -<div class="verse">And every other gibberish</div> -<div class="verse">Uttered by civilization,</div> -<div class="verse">The poet plans his story.</div> -<div class="verse">Life, an old man, cryptic and evanescent,</div> -<div class="verse">Tries to sell some flowers</div> -<div class="verse">To Death, who is young and smiles.</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, this poet is also young—</div> -<div class="verse">Tingling, candid somersault of youth—</div> -<div class="verse">And his words only catch</div> -<div class="verse">Surface novelties of style.</div> -<div class="verse">Different phrases drape one thought.</div> -<div class="verse">“An old man 3 thirds asleep”</div> -<div class="verse">Replaces “an old man completely asleep.”</div> -<div class="verse">Ah, these endless dressmakers.</div> -<div class="verse">They hang a new or faded gown</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the shapes of life:</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_21" id="Page_21">[21]</a></span>They do not cut beneath the mould</div> -<div class="verse">And clutch the huddled forms that wait</div> -<div class="verse">For resurrection in the inner dungeon ...</div> -<div class="verse">Poet and Freudian leave their seats</div> -<div class="verse">To gain the sleek encouragement of supper,</div> -<div class="verse">And only the priest remains.</div> -<div class="verse">From the lumbering torture of years</div> -<div class="verse">Men have wrenched a double hope,</div> -<div class="verse">God and Christ, and sought to calm</div> -<div class="verse">The strained deceptions of their flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">Lady, the tarrying soul,</div> -<div class="verse">Patient and flexible,</div> -<div class="verse">Must often smile at the simple,</div> -<div class="verse">Crude anticipations of men.</div> -<div class="verse">This priest smiles and is sleepy,</div> -<div class="verse">Thinking of coffee with cognac,</div> -<div class="verse">And the warm, assuring duty of prayer.</div> -<div class="verse">The outer smile is ever</div> -<div class="verse">An unconscious obliteration.</div> -<div class="verse">Ah, lady, logics, masks,</div> -<div class="verse">And ecstasies forever</div> -<div class="verse">Spurn the pregnant, black</div> -<div class="verse">Mystery that lets them spend</div> -<div class="verse">The tense importance of a moment.</div> -<div class="verse">Only fantasy and irony,</div> -<div class="verse">Incongruous brothers,</div> -<div class="verse">Can lift themselves above</div> -<div class="verse">The harassed interval that Death permits.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_22" id="Page_22">[22]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">REGARDING AN AMERICAN -VILLAGE</h2></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="center">I</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">O</span> local mannerisms,</div> -<div class="verse">Coarsely woven cloaks</div> -<div class="verse">Thrown upon the plodding,</div> -<div class="verse">Emaciated days within this village,</div> -<div class="verse">I have no contempt or praise</div> -<div class="verse">To give you—no desire</div> -<div class="verse">To rip you off, discovering</div> -<div class="verse">Skin, and undulations known as sin,</div> -<div class="verse">And no desire to revise you</div> -<div class="verse">With glamorous endearments of rhyme.</div> -<div class="verse">Slowly purchased garments</div> -<div class="verse">Of cowardice, men wear you</div> -<div class="verse">And aid their practised shrinking</div> -<div class="verse">From one faint irritation</div> -<div class="verse">Escaping nightly from their souls.</div> -<div class="verse">Night makes men uncertain—</div> -<div class="verse">The mystery of a curtain</div> -<div class="verse">Different from those that hang in windows.</div> -<div class="verse">At night the confidence of flesh</div> -<div class="verse">Becomes less strong and men</div> -<div class="verse">Are forced to rescue it</div> -<div class="verse">With desperate hilarities.</div> -<div class="verse">Observe them now within the bland</div> -<div class="verse">Refuge of manufactured light.</div> -<div class="verse">Between the counters of a village store</div> -<div class="verse">They arm their flesh with feigned</div> -<div class="verse">Convictions brought by laughter.</div> -<div class="verse">Afterwards, as they roll along</div> -<div class="verse">The dark roads leading to their farms,</div> -<div class="verse">The grumbling of their souls will compete</div> -<div class="verse">With the neighing of horses</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_23" id="Page_23">[23]</a></span>And the stir of leaves and weeds.</div> -<div class="verse">Night will lean upon them,</div> -<div class="verse">Teasing the sturdiness of flesh.</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">II</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">The body of Jacob Higgins—</div> -<div class="verse">Belated minstrel—sings and dances</div> -<div class="verse">On the edge of the cliff.</div> -<div class="verse">Once fiendish and accurate,</div> -<div class="verse">His greed has now become</div> -<div class="verse">Frivolous and unskillful,</div> -<div class="verse">Visualizing Death as a new</div> -<div class="verse">Mistress who must be received with lighter manners.</div> -<div class="verse">Preparing for her coming</div> -<div class="verse">He buys “five cents wuth of candy”</div> -<div class="verse">For a grandchild, and with a generous cackle</div> -<div class="verse">Tackles a chair beside the stove.</div> -<div class="verse">Another old man, like a blurred</div> -<div class="verse">Report of winter, seizes</div> -<div class="verse">The firmer meaning of a joke</div> -<div class="verse">About the Ree-publican partee.</div> -<div class="verse">Jacob, using one high laugh,</div> -<div class="verse">Preens himself for celestial dallying.</div> -<div class="verse">Old men in American villages laugh</div> -<div class="verse">To groom the mean, untidy habits</div> -<div class="verse">Of their past existences.</div> -<div class="verse">(They lack the stolid frankness</div> -<div class="verse">Of European peasants.)</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Behind a wire lattice</div> -<div class="verse">Bob Wentworth separates the mail</div> -<div class="verse">With the guise of one intent</div> -<div class="verse">On guessing the contents of a novel.</div> -<div class="verse">Forty years have massed</div> -<div class="verse">Exhausted lies within him,</div> -<div class="verse">And to ease the weight he builds</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_24" id="Page_24">[24]</a></span>Mysteries and fictions</div> -<div class="verse">In the fifty people whom he knows.</div> -<div class="verse">Agnes Holliday receives her letter</div> -<div class="verse">With that erect, affected</div> -<div class="verse">Indifference employed by village girls.</div> -<div class="verse">The words of a distant lover</div> -<div class="verse">Rouse the shallow somnambulist</div> -<div class="verse">Of her heart, and it stares</div> -<div class="verse">Reproachfully at an empty bed.</div> -<div class="verse">Oh, she had forgotten:</div> -<div class="verse">Sugar, corn, and loaves of bread.</div> -<div class="verse">The famished alertness of her reading</div> -<div class="verse">Curtsies to a cheap and orderly</div> -<div class="verse">Trance known to her mind as life.</div> -<div class="verse">Then an anxious, skittish youth</div> -<div class="verse">Behind the counter invites her</div> -<div class="verse">To the weekly dance at Parkertown.</div> -<div class="verse">Concrete pleasures drive their boots</div> -<div class="verse">Against the puny, fruitless dream ...</div> -<div class="verse">And, Thomas Ainsley, they have given you</div> -<div class="verse">Chained tricks for your legs and arms,</div> -<div class="verse">And peevish lulls that play with women’s feet.</div> -<div class="verse">You stroke the paper of your letter—</div> -<div class="verse">An incantation to the absent figure.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">The night upon a country-road</div> -<div class="verse">Is waiting to pounce upon</div> -<div class="verse">The narrow games of these people.</div> -<div class="verse">The power of incomprehensible sounds</div> -<div class="verse">Will cleave their breasts and join</div> -<div class="verse">The smothered gossip of trees,</div> -<div class="verse">And every man will lengthen his steps</div> -<div class="verse">And crave the narcotic safety of home.</div> -<div class="verse">Fear is only the frantic</div> -<div class="verse">Annoyance of a soul,</div> -<div class="verse">Misinterpreted by flesh.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_25" id="Page_25">[25]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">THREE PORTRAITS</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="center">I</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">W</span>ithdraw your hair from the simulated</div> -<div class="verse">Interest of the moon;</div> -<div class="verse">Take every tenuous shadow</div> -<div class="verse">From the aimless tongues of these trees</div> -<div class="verse">And darken your speech until it attains</div> -<div class="verse">A fickle and fantastic</div> -<div class="verse">Acquaintance with the eccentric night;</div> -<div class="verse">Disarrange your dress and make it</div> -<div class="verse">A subtle invitation to nakedness.</div> -<div class="verse">Remove your shoes and stockings</div> -<div class="verse">So that your feet may enjoy</div> -<div class="verse">An embarrassed soliloquy with the grass;</div> -<div class="verse">Place the palm of your hand</div> -<div class="verse">Lightly against your nose,</div> -<div class="verse">Following the slope of some grotesque feeling.</div> -<div class="verse">Devise these careful affronts</div> -<div class="verse">To the heavier intentions</div> -<div class="verse">Of thought and emotion, and gratefully</div> -<div class="verse">Accept your title of minor poet.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Only trees with long roots caught by hills</div> -<div class="verse">Will recognize your importance.</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">II</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">They worship musical sound,</div> -<div class="verse">Protecting the breast of emotion.</div> -<div class="verse">Their feelings pose as fortune-tellers</div> -<div class="verse">And angle for coins from credulous thoughts.</div> -<div class="verse">Shall we abandon this luxury</div> -<div class="verse">Of mild mist and wild raptures?</div> -<div class="verse">Your face refrains from speaking yes</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_26" id="Page_26">[26]</a></span>But your poised eyes roundly</div> -<div class="verse">Reward the luminous question.</div> -<div class="verse">Greece and Asia have exchanged</div> -<div class="verse">Problems upon your face,</div> -<div class="verse">And the fine poise of your head</div> -<div class="verse">Tries to catch their conversation.</div> -<div class="verse">Few people care to use</div> -<div class="verse">Thought as a musical instrument,</div> -<div class="verse">Bringing ingenious restraints to grief and joy,</div> -<div class="verse">But we, with clasped arms, will descend</div> -<div class="verse">Daringly upon this situation.</div> -<div class="verse">The full-blown confusion of life</div> -<div class="verse">Will detest our intrusion.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="center">III</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">If you subtract a nose you add religion,</div> -<div class="verse">Supine, and in a glitter of explanation</div> -<div class="verse">Expanding the unreasonable second</div> -<div class="verse">Of chattering, pugnacious flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">The inquisitive elevation of noses</div> -<div class="verse">Does not fit into the smooth</div> -<div class="verse">Curvatures of faith.</div> -<div class="verse">If you remove the lips you add</div> -<div class="verse">Philosophy, for lips express the warm</div> -<div class="verse">Quarrel of emotions and become</div> -<div class="verse">Crimson antagonists to contemplation.</div> -<div class="verse">If you subtract the eyes you add</div> -<div class="verse">The fertile smugness of earth,</div> -<div class="verse">For eyes are rapid skeptics</div> -<div class="verse">Tossing light beyond the circles of earth.</div> -<div class="verse">Flesh will remain and vacillate</div> -<div class="verse">Between the cocaine of belief</div> -<div class="verse">And times of wakefulness</div> -<div class="verse">Designed to replenish the drug.</div> -<div class="verse">Then reconstruct the face</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_27" id="Page_27">[27]</a></span>With shifting experiments</div> -<div class="verse">Of spirit, fantasy, and intellect,</div> -<div class="verse">Intent upon violating</div> -<div class="verse">The tyrannies of formal reiteration.</div> -<div class="verse">Men will revile you and bestow</div> -<div class="verse">The necessary background.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_28" id="Page_28">[28]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">DEFINITIONS</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">M</span>usic is a treacherous sound,</div> -<div class="verse">Seducing emotions and marking</div> -<div class="verse">Their breathless faces with death.</div> -<div class="verse">Art is an intrepid mountebank,</div> -<div class="verse">Enraging philosophies and creeds</div> -<div class="verse">By stepping into the black space beyond them.</div> -<div class="verse">Religions are blindly tortured eyes,</div> -<div class="verse">Paralyzing the speed of imagination</div> -<div class="verse">With static postures of hope.</div> -<div class="verse">History is an accidental madness,</div> -<div class="verse">Using nations and races</div> -<div class="verse">To simulate a cruel sanity.</div> -<div class="verse">(In the final dust</div> -<div class="verse">This trick will be discovered.)</div> -<div class="verse">Psychology is a rubber-stamp</div> -<div class="verse">Pressed upon a slippery, dodging ghost,</div> -<div class="verse">But thousands of centuries can remove</div> -<div class="verse">All marks of this indignity.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Men, each snuggling proudly</div> -<div class="verse">Into an inch of plausible falsehood,</div> -<div class="verse">Will hate the careless smile</div> -<div class="verse">That whitens these definitions.</div> -<div class="verse">The table has been broken by fists;</div> -<div class="verse">The fanatic has mangled his voice;</div> -<div class="verse">The scientist cautiously repairs the room</div> -<div class="verse">Beyond which he dares not peer.</div> -<div class="verse">Life, they will never cease to explain you.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_29" id="Page_29">[29]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">TO A CORPULENT SINGER</h2></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">I</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">B</span>ulging maturity</div> -<div class="verse">Constructs an unfair version</div> -<div class="verse">Of curves not visible</div> -<div class="verse">To eyes upon the outside face.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">II</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">If a soul is more</div> -<div class="verse">Slender than the motives of wind,</div> -<div class="verse">Flesh provides the necessary</div> -<div class="verse">Privacy, and in a rising voice</div> -<div class="verse">The soul proclaims its gratefulness.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">III</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Who has watched a bear</div> -<div class="verse">Pawing his idea of a breeze?</div> -<div class="verse">The audience in this falsely walled</div> -<div class="verse">Room is pouncing awkwardly</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the small part of a singer’s voice.</div> -<div class="verse">The actual sounds swing easily</div> -<div class="verse">To eyes and ears beyond the edge of earth.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">IV</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">And if to this meandering</div> -<div class="verse">Of metaphysical remarks</div> -<div class="verse">I should add a face</div> -<div class="verse">Where tragedy experiments with lanterns</div> -<div class="verse">To aid a long, sharp nose and wondering lips,</div> -<div class="verse">And laughter is conscious of being</div> -<div class="verse">The excited, misunderstood child of a soul,</div> -<div class="verse">The singer would receive</div> -<div class="verse">Final details of her disguise.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_30" id="Page_30">[30]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">TOPSY-TURVY</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">I</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">I</span>f I insist that violets</div> -<div class="verse">Are intellectual eyes</div> -<div class="verse">Dotting with a wave of sight</div> -<div class="verse">The chained recalcitrance of earth,</div> -<div class="verse">Philosophers and scientists—</div> -<div class="verse">Blind boys who bolt themselves within a room—</div> -<div class="verse">Will seek to torture me</div> -<div class="verse">For the flashing witchcraft</div> -<div class="verse">That rides on thunderclaps</div> -<div class="verse">Called imagination.</div> -<div class="verse">The crystallized escape</div> -<div class="verse">Of fear is known as logic,</div> -<div class="verse">And men have used it to light</div> -<div class="verse">Small spaces in the wilderness of black.</div> -<div class="verse">But I prefer to mount</div> -<div class="verse">Huge horses of the wind,</div> -<div class="verse">Whose fantastic laughter</div> -<div class="verse">Separates to metaphors</div> -<div class="verse">And similes that hurl their decorations</div> -<div class="verse">Against the wide malevolence of space.</div> -<div class="verse">When I return to the morbid</div> -<div class="verse">Helplessness of earth</div> -<div class="verse">And shake off the dream of freedom,</div> -<div class="verse">Men ply their knives of gods</div> -<div class="verse">And creeds upon my skin.</div> -<div class="verse">Much traveling through space</div> -<div class="verse">Has made me immune to pain,</div> -<div class="verse">And metaphors and similes</div> -<div class="verse">Aid my counting of blood-drops,</div> -<div class="verse">Bringing color to mathematics.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_31" id="Page_31">[31]</a></span> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">II</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Lady upon whose head</div> -<div class="verse">I weave the motives of this poem,</div> -<div class="verse">Change your sex to a barely visible</div> -<div class="verse">Trembling that can match the fluttering charm</div> -<div class="verse">Of the wreath that I have made for you.</div> -<div class="verse">When this task is finished</div> -<div class="verse">We may saunter gayly</div> -<div class="verse">Past the cunning niches</div> -<div class="verse">That psychology has made for us.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_32" id="Page_32">[32]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">REVILE THE ACROBAT</h2></div> - - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">M</span>aiden, where are you going,</div> -<div class="verse">With impudence that makes your arms and legs</div> -<div class="verse">Unnecessary feathers?</div> -<div class="verse">Your eyes have interceded</div> -<div class="verse">Between the flesh and soul,</div> -<div class="verse">And show a light of reconciliation.</div> -<div class="verse">For whom have you prepared yourself?</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">I go to see an acrobat</div> -<div class="verse">Reviled by men, and acting</div> -<div class="verse">Within a lonely circus owned</div> -<div class="verse">By Mind, Soul, & Heart, Incorporated.</div> -<div class="verse">I love his limbs whose muscles</div> -<div class="verse">Compete with twirls of gossamer,</div> -<div class="verse">And Oh, I love him not</div> -<div class="verse">With the drooling, fevered weight of earth.</div> -<div class="verse">He turns my blood to one</div> -<div class="verse">Profusion of melted wings.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Maiden, why is this acrobat</div> -<div class="verse">Better than men who stand within</div> -<div class="verse">The favored halls of mind and heart,</div> -<div class="verse">Playing, with lust and dignity,</div> -<div class="verse">Violins and trumpets?</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">They are not better, and he,</div> -<div class="verse">Whose thoughtful quickness combines</div> -<div class="verse">The pliantness of mind and soul,</div> -<div class="verse">He is not worse—the thoughts of men</div> -<div class="verse">Stand still on high roofs of the mind,</div> -<div class="verse">Or borrow sorceries of flesh,</div> -<div class="verse">While he, with flimsy trails</div> -<div class="verse">Of ruffles on a gaudy jacket,</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_33" id="Page_33">[33]</a></span>Springs into the air; assaults</div> -<div class="verse">Every stately, fierce, robust</div> -<div class="verse">Finality that men have made.</div> -<div class="verse">He cares not whether he is right or wrong.</div> -<div class="verse">He seeks a decorative speed</div> -<div class="verse">Of thought and soul, and he is not afraid</div> -<div class="verse">Of being insincere.</div> -<div class="verse">Men loathe him, but I clothe him</div> -<div class="verse">With magnificent, specific</div> -<div class="verse">Fabrics slighter than the remorse of a child</div> -<div class="verse">And bearing involved births of colors.</div> -<div class="verse">Strength is not alone</div> -<div class="verse">The size and thickness known to men!</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_34" id="Page_34">[34]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">COMPULSORY TASKS</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">W</span>ords, it is apparent</div> -<div class="verse">That you are crucified and fondled</div> -<div class="verse">By the pride of each new generation.</div> -<div class="verse">O words, whose sportive formations</div> -<div class="verse">Could make the courts of intellect</div> -<div class="verse">Belligerent and insane,</div> -<div class="verse">Men have sentenced you</div> -<div class="verse">To scores of endless drudgeries.</div> -<div class="verse">Weakened by the years,</div> -<div class="verse">You guard the dying bonfires</div> -<div class="verse">Of each nation and race.</div> -<div class="verse">Again, like hordes of cattle,</div> -<div class="verse">You drag the expectations</div> -<div class="verse">Of social theories and remedies,</div> -<div class="verse">Stopping only when the blood of men</div> -<div class="verse">Washes away your useless labours.</div> -<div class="verse">I have seen your bands</div> -<div class="verse">Of ragged courtesans</div> -<div class="verse">Marching in feverish lines</div> -<div class="verse">To rescue the rites of sex.</div> -<div class="verse">I have watched you rush</div> -<div class="verse">To repair the cracks</div> -<div class="verse">In breaking cathedrals and churches.</div> -<div class="verse">With gilded, exclamatory vowels</div> -<div class="verse">You garnish the cowering of earth,</div> -<div class="verse">And with recurring darkness</div> -<div class="verse">You spurn the peering mind.</div> -<div class="verse">Again you are hands of intellect,</div> -<div class="verse">Disrobing the flesh of men</div> -<div class="verse">And carefully preserving</div> -<div class="verse">Each discarded garment</div> -<div class="verse">With a pinch of powdered emotion.</div> -<div class="verse">Again you are driven forth</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_35" id="Page_35">[35]</a></span>In lying mobs of sighs and laughs</div> -<div class="verse">To warm the evening hours of a nation.</div> -<div class="verse">(“They could never restrain themselves</div> -<div class="verse">To wait at home for the postman ...</div> -<div class="verse">Would Copperfield marry Dora or Agnes?”)</div> -<div class="verse">Sentimental breathlessness</div> -<div class="verse">Fleeing from the helpless decay of thought.</div> -<div class="verse">O words, brow-beaten bricklayers</div> -<div class="verse">Obeying the shouts of science</div> -<div class="verse">And raising walls upon whose top</div> -<div class="verse">The soul is perched, contemptuously</div> -<div class="verse">Squinting down at toiling pygmies:</div> -<div class="verse">O words, and you can be</div> -<div class="verse">Superbly demented skeptics,</div> -<div class="verse">Betraying the unctuous failures of earth;</div> -<div class="verse">Riding the wild horse of the mind:</div> -<div class="verse">Bringing spurs into play;</div> -<div class="verse">Summoning with pain the lurking soul.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_36" id="Page_36">[36]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH -MONEY</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">H</span>ow many planets have you raped,</div> -<div class="verse">Where only animals escaped</div> -<div class="verse">To scrape with melancholy needs</div> -<div class="verse">The bones of last men lost in weeds?</div> -<div class="verse">Since you are blunt and fraudulent</div> -<div class="verse">You must receive a bare treatment.</div> -<div class="verse">Adverbs and adjectives undress</div> -<div class="verse">When greeted by excrescences.</div> -<div class="verse">You are the stench on any street,</div> -<div class="verse">Thick with the vagaries of defeat:</div> -<div class="verse">The wench who plies her squawking crime</div> -<div class="verse">Within the alley-ways of time.</div> -<div class="verse">For men desire to guard with pain</div> -<div class="verse">The limitations of their brain,</div> -<div class="verse">And drag the numbness of their hearts</div> -<div class="verse">Within ornate and creaking carts.</div> -<div class="verse">And for these tasks they must be bold,</div> -<div class="verse">Clutching endurance from a cold</div> -<div class="verse">Squirming with you within the dark,</div> -<div class="verse">And rising blistered with your mark.</div> -<div class="verse">Again you give to doubting lust</div> -<div class="verse">An argument which it can trust.</div> -<div class="verse">Imagination spoils the scene</div> -<div class="verse">And needs a dagger, crude and mean.</div> -<div class="verse">For you were made by men to choke</div> -<div class="verse">A lyric with an obscene joke</div> -<div class="verse">And strike the mind when it is strong,</div> -<div class="verse">With whips methodical and long.</div> -<div class="verse">Men who are inarticulate</div> -<div class="verse">Desire to parody their fate</div> -<div class="verse">With gibberish of clinking coins.</div> -<div class="verse">When life, excited thief, purloins</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_37" id="Page_37">[37]</a></span>The voice and energy of men,</div> -<div class="verse">They lead him to a mouldy pen:</div> -<div class="verse">They seek revenge and watch him wilt,</div> -<div class="verse">Finding importance in his guilt.</div> -<div class="verse">They do not know that they have made</div> -<div class="verse">The thief to revel in his aid.</div> -<div class="verse">And you are there to strain your cheek</div> -<div class="verse">Against imaginations weak—</div> -<div class="verse">Coquettish counterfeit of strength.</div> -<div class="verse">I have observed your metal length</div> -<div class="verse">Of hands drop on the poet’s throat,</div> -<div class="verse">And yet he scarcely saw you gloat.</div> -<div class="verse">To certain men you merely feed</div> -<div class="verse">The stoics of creative need.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> - -<div class="verse"><i>Money</i></div> - -<div class="verse">I am the vicious test with which</div> -<div class="verse">Men find that they are poor or rich.</div> -<div class="verse">Without my challenge men might fail</div> -<div class="verse">To leave the blurred and murderous jail.</div> -<div class="verse">Utopias are merely death:</div> -<div class="verse">Men need the scorching of my breath.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_38" id="Page_38">[38]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">HIGHLY DELIBERATE POEM</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">“M</span>other o’ mi-i-ine, mother o’ mi-i-ine,</div> -<div class="verse">Sweet as uh ro-ose in thuh spring-ti-i-ime”—</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">The man who bawls this song</div> -<div class="verse">Has the face of a spell-bound, hairless rat.</div> -<div class="verse">Entranced within a spotlight,</div> -<div class="verse">He borrows unconsciously</div> -<div class="verse">Another voice from despair.</div> -<div class="verse">The ordinary squeak of his life</div> -<div class="verse">Is paralyzed, and fear of death</div> -<div class="verse">Lends him a tenor voice</div> -<div class="verse">To supplicate the Catcher.</div> -<div class="verse">But the audience fails to understand</div> -<div class="verse">And makes flat sounds of glee</div> -<div class="verse">With hands ... Death, quietly</div> -<div class="verse">Disgusted at this blind approval,</div> -<div class="verse">Takes away the spotlight.</div> -<div class="verse">Now safe, the rat presents</div> -<div class="verse">Jerks of gratitude and scampers off</div> -<div class="verse">To gnaw at his wife within their dressing-room.</div> -<div class="verse">That squeezed-in bag of piteous</div> -<div class="verse">Mythologies described as heart</div> -<div class="verse">Has opened in one thousand people</div> -<div class="verse">And received a vision</div> -<div class="verse">Of past solicitude for other bags.</div> -<div class="verse">The rat repeats this feat and wins</div> -<div class="verse">Varieties of coarse sweetmeats.</div> -<div class="verse">At sixty the rat will be a gorged</div> -<div class="verse">Machiavelli, wondering</div> -<div class="verse">Whether he has not blundered.</div> -<div class="verse">Death finds no interest in killing rats</div> -<div class="verse">And often allows them to live,</div> -<div class="verse">Preferring instead the less buried souls</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_39" id="Page_39">[39]</a></span>Of a poet or a child of ten.</div> -<div class="verse">But the rat has found a fear</div> -<div class="verse">Within the second eyes of whiskey</div> -<div class="verse">And relates it to his wife.</div> -<div class="verse">“Say, May, this thing is funny!</div> -<div class="verse">You won’t believe me, but tonight</div> -<div class="verse">Just before I started the act</div> -<div class="verse">I felt like I was gonna die.</div> -<div class="verse">What in hell is wrong with me?</div> -<div class="verse">This booze must be drivin’ me bughouse.</div> -<div class="verse">Well, move a leg, and get that thousand</div> -<div class="verse">Faulkner promised you, and stop</div> -<div class="verse">Sitting there and staring at me.”</div> -<div class="verse">Death, who has listened with fastidious</div> -<div class="verse">Ennui, strolls off to slay</div> -<div class="verse">A negro infant newly born.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_40" id="Page_40">[40]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">POEM</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">A</span> curious courtship in your brain</div> -<div class="verse">Regulates the movements of your limbs.</div> -<div class="verse">Remorse, the fanciful, abandoned</div> -<div class="verse">Child of madness, discovers its lips</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the breast of a hovering Madonna.</div> -<div class="verse">How many poets present</div> -<div class="verse">The crushed tips of their hearts</div> -<div class="verse">Pieced carefully together as a wreath</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the two heads of this wooing?</div> -<div class="verse">Imagination is a wound</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the adventures of thoughts,</div> -<div class="verse">And one scar left behind</div> -<div class="verse">Is known as reality.</div> -<div class="verse">Will they give you robes</div> -<div class="verse">Threaded with orderly shimmers of repentance,</div> -<div class="verse">Pardoning the scar in earthly ways?</div> -</div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_41" id="Page_41">[41]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">REALISTIC CREATOR</h2></div> - -<p class="center"><i>A Sonnet Dedicated to T. S. Eliot</i></p> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">A</span>n intimate and playful accident</div> -<div class="verse">Common to life had placed him on a bench</div> -<div class="verse">Beside an old and stiffly wounded wench.</div> -<div class="verse">With erudite and careful eyes he sent</div> -<div class="verse">A sneer to tear away her feeble mask</div> -<div class="verse">And snatch the battered dullness of her heart.</div> -<div class="verse">He spied her only in the scheming part</div> -<div class="verse">Of soiled flesh bickering with some trivial task.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">The lacerated madness of her soul,</div> -<div class="verse">And delicate emotions kicked by life,</div> -<div class="verse">Did not invade the swift tricks of his mind.</div> -<div class="verse">Regarding her, he could not see the whole,</div> -<div class="verse">Or catch the psychic lunge behind her strife.</div> -<div class="verse">His eyes were savagely adroit, and blind.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_42" id="Page_42">[42]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">CITY STREETS</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">T</span>his pavement and the sordid boast of stone</div> -<div class="verse">And brick that wins the pity of a sky</div> -<div class="verse">Are only martyred symbols made to buy</div> -<div class="verse">A dream of permanence for flesh and bone.</div> -<div class="verse">The jumbled, furtive anecdotes of lips</div> -<div class="verse">And limbs that bring their fever to this street,</div> -<div class="verse">They will subside to fragments of defeat</div> -<div class="verse">Within the cool republic where death trips.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">This is an age where flesh desires to shape</div> -<div class="verse">Intense hyperboles in prose and verse,</div> -<div class="verse">Transforming city streets and country lanes</div> -<div class="verse">To backgrounds aiding physical escape.</div> -<div class="verse">But city streets are waiting to disperse</div> -<div class="verse">With ruins the fight and plight of earthly pains.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_43" id="Page_43">[43]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">DECADENT CRY<a name="FNanchor_A_1" id="FNanchor_A_1"></a><a href="#Footnote_A_1" class="fnanchor">[A]</a></h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">H</span>ill-flowers salute his feet</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the upward slant of a path.</div> -<div class="verse">His destination does not matter.</div> -<div class="verse">His legs divide the spacious tragedy</div> -<div class="verse">Of distance into the small translation</div> -<div class="verse">Of steps, and with their aid he reaches</div> -<div class="verse">The fraudulent temple of a pause or end.</div> -<div class="verse">Hill-flowers, important and unprejudiced,</div> -<div class="verse">Bow to this monster-clown.</div> -<div class="verse">His feet, ridiculous and neat,</div> -<div class="verse">Do not stop, for they must ape</div> -<div class="verse">A certainty and hasten to attack</div> -<div class="verse">Or praise fixed idols made by flesh and mind.</div> -<div class="verse">Hill-flowers, trimly polished</div> -<div class="verse">Devices hailing preciosity;</div> -<div class="verse">Rumpled by the wind</div> -<div class="verse">To scores of original caprices;</div> -<div class="verse">Bearing the transfigured skirmish</div> -<div class="verse">Of spiritual moods that men call color;</div> -<div class="verse">Swiftly and unassumingly</div> -<div class="verse">Deaf to lusts and traditions—</div> -<div class="verse">They are not regarded</div> -<div class="verse">By the men who walk, flat-footed,</div> -<div class="verse">Or with scholarly exactitude,</div> -<div class="verse">In chase of an ardent chicanery</div> -<div class="verse">Known as flesh, and elderly</div> -<div class="verse">Quibbles of mind and emotion.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Only an intellect clad in sprightly chiffon</div> -<div class="verse">Can spy the importance of flowers on a hill.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<div class="footnote"> - -<p><a name="Footnote_A_1" id="Footnote_A_1"></a><a href="#FNanchor_A_1"><span class="label">[A]</span></a> <i>Dedicated to a rare moment of intelligence on the part of -The Dial.</i></p></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_44" id="Page_44">[44]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">GIRL</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">T</span>he words of men are not conjectures</div> -<div class="verse">Lunging toward your soul:</div> -<div class="verse">They do not wish you to leave</div> -<div class="verse">The fawning thefts of flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">When with covered formality</div> -<div class="verse">They tramp from actual pulpits,</div> -<div class="verse">They merely bring celestial nonsense</div> -<div class="verse">For one, uncurious, sanctified bed.</div> -<div class="verse">Ah, girl, the soul that they give you</div> -<div class="verse">Is a clumsy, white</div> -<div class="verse">Concert-master rebuking</div> -<div class="verse">The first-violin of your body.</div> -<div class="verse">Again they brand a word,</div> -<div class="verse">Sacredness, upon your breast,</div> -<div class="verse">Claiming that your soul is tied</div> -<div class="verse">To the pliant riot of your limbs.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Girl, I can forget for a moment</div> -<div class="verse">That hairs upon the bulge of my chest</div> -<div class="verse">Must be praised or censured,</div> -<div class="verse">And I have no desire</div> -<div class="verse">To belittle you with one,</div> -<div class="verse">Hopeless, cynical, sententious</div> -<div class="verse">Group of words, while intellect,</div> -<div class="verse">Flavoring its tea-cup with a sneer,</div> -<div class="verse">Watches you from shaded balconies.</div> -<div class="verse">When you win the torpid illness</div> -<div class="verse">Known as virtue you are less important</div> -<div class="verse">Than a quest for daisies in the moon,</div> -<div class="verse">And when you merely ask</div> -<div class="verse">For one blow and inertness,</div> -<div class="verse">An old dream yells and ends</div> -<div class="verse">With the quietness of sprawling pity.</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_45" id="Page_45">[45]</a></span>Girl, avoid the plentiful</div> -<div class="verse">Drugs of seriousness and spend</div> -<div class="verse">Pieces of your heart on every whim.</div> -<div class="verse">Give your flesh the light and sharp</div> -<div class="verse">Contacts of a thistle blown</div> -<div class="verse">Across the wincing cheeks of rogues.</div> -<div class="verse">Make your soul and body spurn</div> -<div class="verse">Each other with a swift impertinence,</div> -<div class="verse">And let your clawing griefs and joys</div> -<div class="verse">Be still a moment on the couch of thought.</div> -<div class="verse">And if at times you turn your head</div> -<div class="verse">To spy the hatred of philosophers</div> -<div class="verse">And panting realists, preserve the smile</div> -<div class="verse">Of one who takes a suitable reward.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_46" id="Page_46">[46]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">COLOR AND A WOMAN</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">C</span>ry the names of colors</div> -<div class="verse">And fail to reproduce</div> -<div class="verse">The brightly worried way</div> -<div class="verse">In which they burn ideas,</div> -<div class="verse">Sweeping hues of intangible blood</div> -<div class="verse">Into the conspiring fires of soul:</div> -<div class="verse">The darkly reticent manner</div> -<div class="verse">With which they embalm emotions,</div> -<div class="verse">Ending the spontaneous treachery</div> -<div class="verse">With a self-possessed attraction.</div> -<div class="verse">Chant the names of colors</div> -<div class="verse">And fascinate the brown</div> -<div class="verse">Coward, who surrounds himself</div> -<div class="verse">With crystal safeguards known as facts,</div> -<div class="verse">But likes the dangerous sounds</div> -<div class="verse">Of unattained realities.</div> -<div class="verse">Or, scorn this satirical advice</div> -<div class="verse">And storm the body of a woman</div> -<div class="verse">With words as deliberate as wind,</div> -<div class="verse">Yet heavier, and bearing</div> -<div class="verse">Colors without a label.</div> -<div class="verse">The substance of her hair—</div> -<div class="verse">Ethereal stems that continue their quest</div> -<div class="verse">Beyond the warped confines of sight—</div> -<div class="verse">Shows the darkness of intellect</div> -<div class="verse">Answering a miniature sunset</div> -<div class="verse">Whose dying light does not quite succumb.</div> -<div class="verse">The steep reserve of her forehead</div> -<div class="verse">Has been kindled by a flat burden</div> -<div class="verse">Pale as the cry of a child, yet carrying</div> -<div class="verse">The hint of trouble found in late afternoon.</div> -<div class="verse">Her eyes hold emotional evening,</div> -<div class="verse">With spurts of dawn remaining like anxious relics</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_47" id="Page_47">[47]</a></span>Kept alive by unsatisfied designs</div> -<div class="verse">From that derided realm where logic dies.</div> -<div class="verse">Her breast is the color that a north wind</div> -<div class="verse">Would have if it were visible to eyes.</div> -<div class="verse">Upon her body, color in light and darkness</div> -<div class="verse">Subdues the ribald ponderousness of life</div> -<div class="verse">And brings the filmy, flashing seriousness</div> -<div class="verse">Detested by the prostrate toil of mud;</div> -<div class="verse">Hated in taverns at midnight;</div> -<div class="verse">Banished from every couch when morning</div> -<div class="verse">Rearranges the ancient jest.</div> -</div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_48" id="Page_48">[48]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">RELUCTANT LADY</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">T</span>he widely bruised, shy beauty of a brain</div> -<div class="verse">That renders dogmas bashful with its breath</div> -<div class="verse">Will raise its last, wan offering to death—</div> -<div class="verse">A poise of gossamer that takes the rain</div> -<div class="verse">Of darkness, with an unexpectant pride.</div> -<div class="verse">Your thoughts are old and yet too young for life</div> -<div class="verse">Whose ponderous sneer preserves their curling strife.</div> -<div class="verse">They wait for heavy spear-points, side by side.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">You are a wilted pilgrim on a road</div> -<div class="verse">Where hills and rubbish-pits receive alike</div> -<div class="verse">The skeptical remonstrance of your pace.</div> -<div class="verse">You pass through towns and raise your thoughtful load</div> -<div class="verse">To shield your loves against the words that strike</div> -<div class="verse">The sheer, elastic trouble of your face.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_49" id="Page_49">[49]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">PSYCHOLOGY FROM MARS</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">T</span>orban flattered the details</div> -<div class="verse">Of his festival in brown—a beard—</div> -<div class="verse">With fingers that held a musical length,</div> -<div class="verse">And spoke of psychology.</div> -<div class="verse">The clever reproduction</div> -<div class="verse">Of a human being,</div> -<div class="verse">His appearance lacked</div> -<div class="verse">A hairsbreadth of reality</div> -<div class="verse">And barely failed to convince.</div> -<div class="verse">His eyes, assemblages of planets</div> -<div class="verse">Miraculously dwarfed, were small</div> -<div class="verse">But did not hold the shifting gluttony</div> -<div class="verse">Common to little eyes.</div> -<div class="verse">His lips were unsubstantial fibres</div> -<div class="verse">And the straight line of his nose</div> -<div class="verse">Gained an unearthly sincerity.</div> -<div class="verse">His body was muscular but failed to reveal</div> -<div class="verse">The smug delusion of superiority</div> -<div class="verse">That lives within physical strength.</div> -<div class="verse">With a voice in which pity and satire</div> -<div class="verse">Mingled bewilderedly with each other,</div> -<div class="verse">He spoke of psychology.</div> -<div class="verse">“Normal and average men</div> -<div class="verse">On Mars are charged with being</div> -<div class="verse">Insane and distorted oracles.</div> -<div class="verse">Because they desire to resemble each other</div> -<div class="verse">We force them to live together</div> -<div class="verse">On drably elaborate plateaus.</div> -<div class="verse">There they fashion cities—</div> -<div class="verse">Geometrical madness</div> -<div class="verse">That censures shreds of dread and unrest</div> -<div class="verse">Within the spaces of its heart.</div> -<div class="verse">There they retreat to farms,</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_50" id="Page_50">[50]</a></span>And the disciplined exhaustion</div> -<div class="verse">Of their lives reclines upon</div> -<div class="verse">Monotonous rewards known as harvests.</div> -<div class="verse">They cling to homes—slumbering alcoves</div> -<div class="verse">Plentifully supplied</div> -<div class="verse">With complimenting mirrors</div> -<div class="verse">And altars for the mind.</div> -<div class="verse">Sometimes a revolution</div> -<div class="verse">Seduces their living flatness,</div> -<div class="verse">And an original confusion</div> -<div class="verse">Follows rumours of creation,</div> -<div class="verse">But the sanity vanishes</div> -<div class="verse">Into the marching unison</div> -<div class="verse">Of their repentant madness.</div> -<div class="verse">We who are sane live below the plateaus.</div> -<div class="verse">‘Home’ to us is a flitting answer:</div> -<div class="verse">Different spots inevitably</div> -<div class="verse">Transformed by our bodies garlanded with mind,</div> -<div class="verse">Or requests of the heart</div> -<div class="verse">That tarry a moment for shelter.</div> -<div class="verse">As we wander we tear</div> -<div class="verse">And rebuild ancient lanes and houses,</div> -<div class="verse">Leaving a sentinel of change</div> -<div class="verse">Behind to confront the next traveller.</div> -<div class="verse">We stroll in twos and threes</div> -<div class="verse">That endure for a day or an hour,</div> -<div class="verse">And we never linger</div> -<div class="verse">At one place to gloat over details.</div> -<div class="verse">Restless sanity, my friend,</div> -<div class="verse">Equips the changing cries within us.</div> -<div class="verse">Restless sanity</div> -<div class="verse">Prevents us from complacently</div> -<div class="verse">Dozing over miniatures,</div> -<div class="verse">With a dream of importance</div> -<div class="verse">Rocking within the rhythms of our hearts!”</div> -</div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_51" id="Page_51">[51]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">TO TIME</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">O</span> Time, you are an idiot’s fluid curse.</div> -<div class="verse">O Time, you are an uninspired hearse.</div> -<div class="verse">O Time, you kill beneath your robe of nurse.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">O Time, your eyes are cherubs drowned in pools,</div> -<div class="verse">O Time, your wisdom scorns the aid of stools,</div> -<div class="verse">O Time, your kindness blinds the life of fools.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">O Time, you blur pretentious intellect.</div> -<div class="verse">O Time, you break the thrones that thoughts erect.</div> -<div class="verse">O Time, your hands indifferently correct</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">The incoherent sorceries of men</div> -<div class="verse">Who dance before a monstrous Axe and Pen,</div> -<div class="verse">Waving the fetiches of words, and then</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Censure the dance with pedestals of gauze</div> -<div class="verse">Cleverly imitating rock, and laws</div> -<div class="verse">Whose opaque sureness broods above their cause.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">When irony will cease to be obscure</div> -<div class="verse">To men whose eyes resent the cloudy lure</div> -<div class="verse">That ends their tiny clarities, with pure</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">And forming mists of words, then men will climb</div> -<div class="verse">With restless regularity, like Time,</div> -<div class="verse">Who merely seeks a changing pantomime.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">O Time, you are too pure and swiftly wide</div> -<div class="verse">For men who try to check your colored stride</div> -<div class="verse">With opaque temples and a sleeping bride.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_52" id="Page_52">[52]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">DECADENT DUET</h2></div> - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse2"><i>Torban</i></div> - -<div class="verse">Lightly sharp and even,</div> -<div class="verse">Your voice is the sound of an airplane</div> -<div class="verse">Darting high above your unreceptive face.</div> -<div class="verse">Your voice is unrelated</div> -<div class="verse">To the structure of your face,</div> -<div class="verse">And on your lips an echo merely rides,</div> -<div class="verse">The pagan shimmerings of your face</div> -<div class="verse">Receive the voice with a subtle disbelief.</div> -<div class="verse">Indeed, your intellectuality,</div> -<div class="verse">Speeding though spaces over your head,</div> -<div class="verse">Must seem of little consequence</div> -<div class="verse">To the nymph who listens far below.</div> -<div class="verse">That you are thus divided is not strange,</div> -<div class="verse">But you contain a third Self</div> -<div class="verse">And it regards the other two</div> -<div class="verse">With a grave and patient interest.</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse2"><i>Woman</i></div> - - -<div class="verse">Phantasmagoria,</div> -<div class="verse">Ruling arabesques of words,</div> -<div class="verse">Your attenuated variations</div> -<div class="verse">Of thought and emotion will enrage</div> -<div class="verse">The blunt convictions of more earthly men.</div> -<div class="verse">The pagan rituals of my face</div> -<div class="verse">Distrust your words, and my mind,</div> -<div class="verse">Dropping its voice from fancied heights,</div> -<div class="verse">Resents the indirectness of your style.</div> -<div class="verse">But the third Self within me,</div> -<div class="verse">Generous and immobile of face,</div> -<div class="verse">Cares only for the skill</div> -<div class="verse">With which you elevate</div> -<div class="verse">Vainly celebrating shades</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_53" id="Page_53">[53]</a></span>Of thought and protesting emotion.</div> -<div class="verse">Color, form, and substance—</div> -<div class="verse">Three complaining slaves</div> -<div class="verse">Engraving the details of prearranged tasks</div> -<div class="verse">Within stationary brains and hearts.</div> -<div class="verse">My third Self would release them</div> -<div class="verse">To an original abandon</div> -<div class="verse">That exchanges intangible countries,</div> -<div class="verse">With a gracious, gaudy treason.</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse2"><i>Torban</i></div> - - -<div class="verse">Lacking a better name</div> -<div class="verse">I will call your third Self “soul.”</div> -<div class="verse">The ancient, merry game</div> -<div class="verse">Of fighting over labels</div> -<div class="verse">Must not dismay our duet.</div> -<div class="verse">To most men soul exists</div> -<div class="verse">Only when their sensual weariness</div> -<div class="verse">Needs to be gilded with a religion</div> -<div class="verse">Or a deified memory of flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">We contain a lurking wanderer</div> -<div class="verse">Upon our inner roads, and he</div> -<div class="verse">Sometimes stops to drop pitying hands</div> -<div class="verse">Upon the forms of thought and emotions</div> -<div class="verse">Branded with scores of prejudices.</div> -<div class="verse">Men have hated him for centuries,</div> -<div class="verse">And hatred, symbol of sly cowardice,</div> -<div class="verse">Has draped its desire in false scorn</div> -<div class="verse">And named him Decadence.</div> -<div class="verse">Thus ends our decadent duet.</div> -<div class="verse">Come, there are roads on which we must pirouette.</div> -<div class="verse">The proper contrast will be furnished</div> -<div class="verse">By philosophers, scientists, and sensualists.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_54" id="Page_54">[54]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">POEM TO A POLICEMAN</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">M</span>arionnette-fanatic,</div> -<div class="verse">Your active club within this riot</div> -<div class="verse">Was once the passive integrity</div> -<div class="verse">Of a branch upon a tree.</div> -<div class="verse">Now without success</div> -<div class="verse">It tries to beat out fire</div> -<div class="verse">Writhing in human skulls.</div> -<div class="verse">The pause of nature, transformed</div> -<div class="verse">Survival of every memory and defeat,</div> -<div class="verse">Separates to bits of action</div> -<div class="verse">Aiding an inexplicable fever.</div> -<div class="verse">The hands of centuries press</div> -<div class="verse">These bits into another</div> -<div class="verse">Pause before corruption.</div> -<div class="verse">O pernicious circle,</div> -<div class="verse">I will not believe</div> -<div class="verse">That your parsimonious farce</div> -<div class="verse">Reiterates itself through space.</div> -<div class="verse">The souls of men achieve</div> -<div class="verse">An accidental dream</div> -<div class="verse">That seems important merely</div> -<div class="verse">Because the figures which it holds</div> -<div class="verse">Have invented small and almost</div> -<div class="verse">Non-existent divisions of time.</div> -<div class="verse">Yet, trapped within these months and years,</div> -<div class="verse">I turn to you, marionnette-fanatic.</div> -<div class="verse">You at least can bring</div> -<div class="verse">Diversion to my chained</div> -<div class="verse">Impatience as I wait for death.</div> -<div class="verse">How wildly you protect</div> -<div class="verse">The sluggish minds of men!</div> -<div class="verse">A calculating laziness of thought</div> -<div class="verse">Has created you to guard its doors,</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_55" id="Page_55">[55]</a></span>While other men require</div> -<div class="verse">An outward expression of peace</div> -<div class="verse">Beneath which the inner struggle</div> -<div class="verse">Can revel in privacy.</div> -<div class="verse">And so, with buttons of brass</div> -<div class="verse">And blue uniform that lend</div> -<div class="verse">An incongruous dignity</div> -<div class="verse">To your task, you defend</div> -<div class="verse">The myriads of insincerities</div> -<div class="verse">That drape a mutilated need.</div> -<div class="verse">And yet, unconsciously,</div> -<div class="verse">And at rare times you save</div> -<div class="verse">The face of beauty from an old</div> -<div class="verse">Insult in the fists of men.</div> -<div class="verse">Yes, you are not entirely</div> -<div class="verse">Without extenuation,</div> -<div class="verse">Marionnette-fanatic.</div> -</div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_56" id="Page_56">[56]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">INTIMATE SCENE</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">B</span>ed-room, you have earned</div> -<div class="verse">The sympathy of dirt,</div> -<div class="verse">And bear upon your air</div> -<div class="verse">Malevolent and thwarted</div> -<div class="verse">Essences of men.</div> -<div class="verse">Many contorters of bellies</div> -<div class="verse">Have stirred an urgent travesty</div> -<div class="verse">Shielded by your greasy dusk,</div> -<div class="verse">And hearts have found upon your couch</div> -<div class="verse">A brief, delicious insult.</div> -<div class="verse">Cheap room within a lodging-house,</div> -<div class="verse">You are not merely space</div> -<div class="verse">For the coronation of flesh,</div> -<div class="verse">And your odorous bed-quilts</div> -<div class="verse">Need not only provoke</div> -<div class="verse">The casual jeering of thought.</div> -</div> - -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="center">II</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">Woman and her master</div> -<div class="verse">Close the door too quietly.</div> -<div class="verse">With a mien of slinking</div> -<div class="verse">Insecurity, the woman turns</div> -<div class="verse">Within the dangling darkness of the room</div> -<div class="verse">And mumbles orders to her man.</div> -<div class="verse">Anticipation and disgust</div> -<div class="verse">Rout each other upon her face.</div> -<div class="verse">Then the gas-light brings</div> -<div class="verse">Its feeble understanding to the room.</div> -<div class="verse">Woman and man slump down</div> -<div class="verse">Within the chairs and regard</div> -<div class="verse">The tired amens of their feet.</div> -<div class="verse">For a time weariness</div> -<div class="verse">Banishes the theatrical</div> -<div class="verse">Divisions of masculine and feminine,</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_57" id="Page_57">[57]</a></span>But returning strength</div> -<div class="verse">Calls to the untrue drama.</div> -<div class="verse">The man demands, with practised expectation,</div> -<div class="verse">Money squeezed from an automatic night;</div> -<div class="verse">Curses at the smallness of the sum,</div> -<div class="verse">And cuffs his woman without intensity,</div> -<div class="verse">Desiring only an excuse</div> -<div class="verse">For the slowness of his mind.</div> -<div class="verse">She is not a composition</div> -<div class="verse">Waiting for its orchestra of pain:</div> -<div class="verse">His fists can merely give</div> -<div class="verse">An inexpensive spice</div> -<div class="verse">To the apathy within her.</div> -<div class="verse">Soon the man and woman laugh,</div> -<div class="verse">To kill an inner jumble of sounds</div> -<div class="verse">Which they cannot separate—</div> -<div class="verse">Nightly complaint of their souls.</div> -<div class="verse">He pinches one of her cheeks,</div> -<div class="verse">Like an Emperor deigning</div> -<div class="verse">To test the softness of a bauble,</div> -<div class="verse">And she finds within his fingers</div> -<div class="verse">An endurable compliment.</div> -<div class="verse">When morning light exposes</div> -<div class="verse">Each deficiency within the room,</div> -<div class="verse">Man and woman open their eyes.</div> -<div class="verse">Hallucination of fire</div> -<div class="verse">No longer streams over the moving screens.</div> -<div class="verse">Woman and her man</div> -<div class="verse">Stare, with disapproval, at the walls,</div> -<div class="verse">And their souls become</div> -<div class="verse">Querulous captives almost gaining lips.</div> -<div class="verse">Then emotional habits</div> -<div class="verse">Revive the earthly hoax.</div> -<div class="verse">Rising from the bed,</div> -<div class="verse">Man and woman use their voices</div> -<div class="verse">Reassuringly.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_58" id="Page_58">[58]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">NEW YORK CITY</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">N</span>ew York, it would be easy to revile</div> -<div class="verse">The flatly carnal beggar in your smile,</div> -<div class="verse">And flagellate, with a superior bliss,</div> -<div class="verse">The gasping routines of your avarice.</div> -<div class="verse">Loud men reward you with an obvious ax,</div> -<div class="verse">Or piteous laurel-wreath, and their attacks</div> -<div class="verse">And eulogies blend to a common sin.</div> -<div class="verse">New York, perhaps an intellectual grin</div> -<div class="verse">That brings its bright cohesion to the warm</div> -<div class="verse">Confusion of the heart, can mold your swarm</div> -<div class="verse">Of huge, drab blunders into smaller grace ...</div> -<div class="verse">With old words I shall gamble for your face.</div> -</div> -<div class="stanza"> -<div class="verse">The evening kneels between your filthy brick,</div> -<div class="verse">Darkly indifferent to each scheme and trick</div> -<div class="verse">With which your men insult and smudge their day.</div> -<div class="verse">When evenings metaphysically pray</div> -<div class="verse">Above the weakening dance of men, they find</div> -<div class="verse">That every eye that looks at them is blind.</div> -<div class="verse">And yet, New York, I say that evenings free</div> -<div class="verse">An insolently mystic majesty</div> -<div class="verse">From your parades of automatic greed.</div> -<div class="verse">For one dark moment all your narrow speed</div> -<div class="verse">Receives the fighting blackness of a soul,</div> -<div class="verse">And every nervous lie swings to a whole—</div> -<div class="verse">A pilgrim, blurred yet proud, who finds in black</div> -<div class="verse">An arrogance that fills his straining lack.</div> -<div class="verse">Between your undistinguished crates of stone</div> -<div class="verse">And wood, the wounded dwarfs who walked alone—</div> -<div class="verse">The chorus-girls, whose indiscretions hang</div> -<div class="verse">Between the scavengers of rouge and slang;</div> -<div class="verse">The women moulding painfully a fresh</div> -<div class="verse">Excuse for pliant treacheries of flesh;</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_59" id="Page_59">[59]</a></span>The men who raise the tin sword of a creed,</div> -<div class="verse">Convinced that it can kill the lunge of greed;</div> -<div class="verse">The thieves whose poisoned vanity purloins</div> -<div class="verse">A fancied victory from ringing coins;</div> -<div class="verse">The staidly bloated men whose minds have sold</div> -<div class="verse">Their quickness to an old, metallic Scold;</div> -<div class="verse">The neatly cultured men whose hopes and fears</div> -<div class="verse">Dwell in soft prisons honored by past years;</div> -<div class="verse">The men whose tortured youth bends to the task</div> -<div class="verse">Of hardening offal to a swaggering mask—</div> -<div class="verse">The night, with black hands, gathers each mistake</div> -<div class="verse">And strokes a mystic challenge from each ache.</div> -<div class="verse">The night, New York, sardonic and alert,</div> -<div class="verse">Offers a soul to your reluctant dirt.</div> -</div></div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_60" id="Page_60">[60]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">WE WANT LYRICS</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">T</span>housands of faces break</div> -<div class="verse">To one word called dramatic:</div> -<div class="verse">Thousands of faces attain</div> -<div class="verse">An over-worked, realistic</div> -<div class="verse">Clash of stupidities.</div> -<div class="verse">At first the mob spreads out</div> -<div class="verse">Its animated fights of lines—</div> -<div class="verse">Butcher with a face one degree</div> -<div class="verse">Removed from the dead flesh which he cuts;</div> -<div class="verse">Socialist whose face rebukes</div> -<div class="verse">The cry for justice tumbling from his lips;</div> -<div class="verse">Five professors of English</div> -<div class="verse">Whose faces are essentially</div> -<div class="verse">School-boys coerced by erudition;</div> -<div class="verse">Bank-clerk with a face</div> -<div class="verse">Where curiosity</div> -<div class="verse">Weakly contends against</div> -<div class="verse">The shrewd frown brought by counting slips of money;</div> -<div class="verse">Girls whose first twenty years</div> -<div class="verse">Have merely shown them the exact</div> -<div class="verse">Shade of pouting necessary</div> -<div class="verse">For the gain of price-marked objects;</div> -<div class="verse">Boys with cocksure faces</div> -<div class="verse">Where an awkward lyric</div> -<div class="verse">Wins the vitriol of civilization;</div> -<div class="verse">Shop-girl whose face is like</div> -<div class="verse">The faint beginning of a courtezan</div> -<div class="verse">Prisoned by the trance of unsought labor;</div> -<div class="verse">Wealthy man whose face</div> -<div class="verse">Holds a courteous, bored</div> -<div class="verse">Reply to traces of imagination;</div> -<div class="verse">Housewife with a round</div> -<div class="verse">Face where dying disappointments</div> -<div class="verse"><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_61" id="Page_61">[61]</a></span>Flirt with hosts of angel-lies;</div> -<div class="verse">Old men with faces where a psychic doubt</div> -<div class="verse">Invades the ruins of noses, lips, and eyes</div> -<div class="verse">And dreams of better structures;</div> -<div class="verse">Old woman with a face</div> -<div class="verse">Like a bashful rag-picker</div> -<div class="verse">Rescuing bits of cast-off deviltries</div> -<div class="verse">Beneath the ebbing light of eyes.</div> -<div class="verse">Stare upon these faces,</div> -<div class="verse">With emotion cooled by every</div> -<div class="verse">Bantering of thought,</div> -<div class="verse">And they fade to one disorganized</div> -<div class="verse">Defeat that craves the smooth</div> -<div class="verse">Lubrications of music.</div> -<div class="verse">The mob upon this street</div> -<div class="verse">Reiterates one shout:</div> -<div class="verse">“We want lyrics! Give us lyrics!”</div> -<div class="verse">Space, and stars, and conscious thought</div> -<div class="verse">Stand above the house-tops of this street;</div> -<div class="verse">Look down with frowning interest;</div> -<div class="verse">Regard the implacable enemy.</div> -</div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_62" id="Page_62">[62]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">A VISITOR FROM MARS SMILES</h2></div> - - -<div class="poetry-container"> -<div class="poetry"> -<div class="verse"><span class="xxlarge">“E</span>rudite and burnished poets seek</div> -<div class="verse">Pliant strength from Latin, French, and Greek</div> -<div class="verse">Phrases, finding English incomplete.</div> -<div class="verse">Or do they conceal their real defeat,</div> -<div class="verse">Like some juggler, faltering, who drops</div> -<div class="verse">Circling, rapid balls of words and stops</div> -<div class="verse">To relate obscure, pretentious tales,</div> -<div class="verse">Hiding nervous moments where he fails?”</div> -<div class="verse">Torban, visiting from Mars, became</div> -<div class="verse">Silent, and his smile, like mental fame,</div> -<div class="verse">Rescued the obscurity of flesh.</div> -<div class="verse">Then I answered with a careful, fresh</div> -<div class="verse">Purchase from the scorned shop of my mind.</div> -<div class="verse">“Men must advertise the things they find.</div> -<div class="verse">Erudition, tired after work,</div> -<div class="verse">Flirts with plotting vanities that lurk</div> -<div class="verse">Poutingly upon the edge of thought.</div> -<div class="verse">Languages and legends men have caught</div> -<div class="verse">Practice an irrelevant parade</div> -<div class="verse">With emotions morbidly arrayed.”</div> -<div class="verse">Torban gave the blunt wealth of his smile.</div> -<div class="verse">“We, in Mars, have but one tongue whose guile</div> -<div class="verse">Does not yield to little, vain designs.</div> -<div class="verse">Feelings are fermented thoughts whose wines</div> -<div class="verse">Bring an aimless fierceness to the mind.</div> -<div class="verse">And a row of eyes, convinced and blind,</div> -<div class="verse">But we sip them carefully, for we</div> -<div class="verse">Do not like your spontaneity.</div> -<div class="verse">Children babbling on the rocks in Mars,</div> -<div class="verse">Shrieking as they dart in tinseled cars,</div> -<div class="verse">Are spontaneous, but as they grow,</div> -<div class="verse">We remove this noisy curse and throw</div> -<div class="verse">Nimbleness to rule their tongues and ears—</div> -<div class="verse">Juggling games that slay their shouts and fears.</div> -<div class="verse">Novelty to you is almost crime:</div> -<div class="verse">We decorate the treachery of time!”</div> -</div></div> - -<hr class="chap" /> - - - - - -<div class="chapter"> -<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_63" id="Page_63">[63]</a></span> -<h2 class="nobreak">SURPRISE</h2></div> - - -<p><span class="xxlarge">H</span>e knew that he was dead because his fingers had -forgotten the art of touching and were trying to regain -their ability. They were no longer able to separate -different textures and surfaces, and everything held to -them a preposterous smoothness that suggested an urbane, -impenetrable sophistry. With a methodical despair -they gripped one object after another, disputing -the integrity of their condition, and when at last they -capitulated he accepted the verity of his death. So -far he had not sought to use his eyes or ears—he had -existed only as a limited intensity of thought and emotion -that directed his hands in a fight for variations -in feeling. Now he discovered his sight, and in that -moment avalanches of metaphors and similes—the detailed -disguises and comparisons with which two eyes -arbitrarily brand a comforting distinctness upon a mystery—rushed -from his head and arranged themselves -to form a world. This was a reversal of life, since in -life the human eye detects and reflects the objects around -it, as all good scientists will testify, and does not first -project these objects and afterwards reflect them. But -this man, being dead, found that his eyes had thrown -myriads of determinations upon a shapeless mass and -changed it to an equal number of still and animated -forms. The desires within his eyes were continually -altering the objects around them, so that a tree became -shifting plausibilities of design and a red rose was merely -an obedient chameleon. Of course, this could never -have happened in life, since in life different shapes hold -a fixed contour, appearance, and meaning, but this man -was fortunate enough to be dead, so his eyes meddled -incorrigibly with the shapes and colors which they imagined -that they had made.</p> - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_64" id="Page_64">[64]</a></span>He sat in a room constructed by himself, and after -he had become conscious of the result he saw that it -was a hotel-room located in Detroit, Michigan. He -examined the furniture, walls, and floor, and they were -to him the firmness of his imagination divided into forms -that sheltered the different needs within him. If he -had still been alive he would have accepted the reality -of shapes made by the majority-imaginations of other -men, regardless of whether they pleased him or not, -but death had given him a more audacious vigor and -the room in which he was sitting did not resemble to -his eyes the same chamber in which he had once reclined -during his living hours. He knew that the power -of his desire had returned him to a hotel-room in Detroit, -Michigan, and had disarranged everything except its location -and exact position. The floor was an incandescent -white and suggested a proudly prostrate expanse—it -did not have the supine appearance that pine and oak -floors hold to the eyes of life. The furniture had lost -its guise of being too economically pinned down by -curves and angles, and its lines were more relaxed and -disordered. The chairs were comfortable without relinquishing -an aesthetic sincerity of line—a semblance -scarcely ever held by chairs that figure in life—and -the top of the table was not flat but depressed and -elevated in different places, since the imagination of this -dead man had dared to become more unobstructed. The -bed had an air of counseling as well as supporting, and -its posters were high and curved in above the center -of a gently sloping bowl that formed the bottom. Also, -the walls of the room stood with a lighter erectness in -place of the rooted, martinet aspect that walls present -to living eyes, while the ceiling gave an impression of -cloth that could be easily flung aside and had not been -spread by a passion for flat concealment.</p> - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_65" id="Page_65">[65]</a></span>As the dead man sat in this room which he had revised, -his memory began to distribute pains throughout -his brain, and he realized that the room had dominated -the last third of his life. The room had been the scene -of his final meeting with a woman whom he loved, for -a week later she had died after being thrown from a -horse. Within this room they had spoken and touched -for the last time on earth, and afterwards the room had -become to him a square world isolated in a possibly -round world—a continent in quality and not in size, -where he could disrupt the imaginative lines fashioned -by other men, changing a rose to an intellectual face -if he so desired. Every visual detail and remembered -word of the woman had merged to a guardian silence, -enclosing this separate world with alert sentinels of -understanding. He recollected these affirmations with -the satisfaction of a transforming creator, for his experiences -had become fantasies which his memory strove -to make real. This was, however, the result of his death -for, as all good men will tell you, the memory of living -beings is entirely different and often adds inaccurate -touches to the reality of experience, making this reality -fantastic and untrue.</p> - -<p>His sense of hearing revived almost simultaneously -with his memory, for hearing is the foremost aid in a -capture of past happenings since its productions do not -fade from the mind as rapidly as those of other senses. -He found that his hearing was inextricably a part of -thought and signified, indeed, the fragmentary release -of thought, and this alteration drove from him every -vestige of disbelief in his death, for he knew that in -life hearing is almost always the sense used by men -to divert the fatigue of their minds (the servant of -meaningless ecstasies). Then his sense of smell, changed -from an unseen drug to a floating search, collided with<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_66" id="Page_66">[66]</a></span> -the odor of a woman—an odor that was less smooth -and more candid than the natural ones held by women -who are alive. Turning his head to the left, for the -first time, he saw that the woman whom he loved was -seated near him. Her naked body still gave the appearance -of flesh curved as it had been during her life, but -it was no longer a slyly prisoned invitation to his sense -of touch. It aroused within him a feeling of thinly -langourous intimacy and became a visible grave into -which his thoughts could sink for future resurrection. -It was as though a desire, once coarse and reeking with -a defeated violence, had been transmuted to a longing -for less fleeting and frantic pressures, while one former -thrill became more diffused and deliberately sensitive, -finding a possession to which the sense of touch was -incidental, and not inevitable. The hemispheres of her -breasts, imperfect and firm, and the long taperings of -her limbs were to him forms which he wanted to envelope -carefully with earnest refinements of motion, gaining in -this way a less explanatory medium for his mind, and -anything resembling an invasion would have seemed to -him an abruptly senseless blunder. He saw that her -face was still a gathering of boyish bewilderments beneath -a mass of hair that had grown more cloudy, but -these expressions were hugged by a light that made them -unnecessary survivals of experience. He secured the -impression that death was amusing itself with the trivialities -of her features, while they held a perfect comprehension -of the jest without abandoning their outward -shapes. At this moment he became aware of the nakedness -of his own body and felt the loss of that snug -assurance which his skin had once given him. In its -place there was a sheath that seemed hardly more than -a visual flutter.</p> - -<p>He looked up at the woman and their smiles were<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_67" id="Page_67">[67]</a></span> -adeptly synchronized. Living people are apt to smile -when they have hidden too little and weep when there -is nothing left to hide, but the smiles of this dead man -and woman were informal exercises of candour—thought -adopting more perceptible and less evasive signals.</p> - -<p>“Have you been sitting here since your death?” he -asked. “No, I’ve also been creating on the streets of -Detroit,” she said. “You manage it in this way. First -you drive all of the alertness out of your senses and -your mind, and everything around you becomes a vibrating, -shapeless substance, a little thicker than mist and -hued with a gray that is almost colorless. Then you -give a moderate vigor to your senses and your mind, -and the substance breaks into hosts of shapes. You -have attained the perceptions of an ordinary, living -person and you find that you are walking on a street. -During all of this time you have held back the strength -of your imagination, which is alone real, but now you -release it and it shoots from you and follows the commands -of your desires. An old man’s whiskers change -to a weedy sprouting of thought, and each hair is the -dangling of a different idea. You can see the decay of -an empire crowding itself into a young girl’s green and -mean hat, and different events emerge and group themselves -to seize or obliterate the color. A woman’s leg -becomes a fat blasphemy and within its shaking famous -jelly you can spy a saint, writhing in the effort to free -himself. A young man’s shoulders are two, dead, delicate -thoughts caught in a bulging tomb, with their ghosts -speaking through each unconscious movement of his arms. -The street-pavement lives and is a hard, detached hatred, -sapping the strength of those who have enslaved it.... -Sometimes I’ve returned to this room, not to rest, for -weariness springs only from that thick weakness of -imagination known as flesh, but to find you here before -the final emphasis of your death.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_68" id="Page_68">[68]</a></span>“Since I’m not accustomed to being dead I must -ask questions whose answers are obvious to you,” he -said. “Why are living beings unable to see you? How -do you avoid their jostling and the rolling devices that -they have made? How can we sit in a hotel-room, which -must at the same time be occupied by living beings, without -seeing or hearing them? Treat me as an earthly -school-boy for a moment.”</p> - -<p>“Living beings dwell in realms made by their imaginations,” -she said. “We do not fit into these realms and -consequently we are not forms that can be detected by -the senses and imaginations of people who are alive. -The desires of these people have created a world of -objects and substantiations which does not match our -own, and so our world is an independent one placed over -the world of living men. With different intensities and -designs of imagination we invade a shapeless substance -and give it the elaborate distinctness of our longings. -This substance is inert imagination, and when we make -our senses and minds blank we become a part of it. Of -course, I use the word imagination because death has -not yet taught me a better one. Beyond the earth there -are stars and space which are not controlled and shaped -by our individual imaginations, and when the feet of -our imaginations become light enough to rise beyond -the shapeless mass which gave birth to them, we shall -discover what greater imaginations in turn gave birth to -the feeble beginning which formed us. And so we shall -be able to discard this word, imagination, which only -represents the boundaries of our desire and its attendant -senses and thoughts, and gain the words of greater explanations. -But before we depart from these boundaries -we must make ourselves entirely clear and untroubled, -and it will be necessary for us to reconstruct the last -meeting that we had during our lifetimes. This meeting<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_69" id="Page_69">[69]</a></span> -troubles us with an unfulfillment of imagination, -and if we do not alter it the strength of our imaginations -will be hampered by a recollection of former weakness. -All men and women who die must return to the -most swiftly vivid scene that their imaginations were -able to attain during the period known as life. In this -way the scene is gradually made perfect by understanding, -and the imagination, shaking off the terror of past -weakness and indecision, is able to float away from the -substance that created it. Because our imaginations -were much stronger than the ones surrounding them, we -can achieve this task immediately, while other dead -people must slowly grapple for this emancipation, visiting -their scene in those guises which living people call -ghosts.”</p> - -<p>“You must direct me,” he said. “I was never much -in harmony with the imaginative semblances and rituals -of most living people, and now that I am dead I can -scarcely remember them.”</p> - -<p>“Make your senses heavy and tight,” she said. -“Reduce them to a condition that approaches a stupor—a -hopeful stupor such as prevails among those living -men known as mystics and priests. When you have accomplished -this, make little rows of imaginative objects -and force your mind to squeeze itself within them, -adoring some and hating others. Then try to arouse -your senses by concentrating them upon a thickly plotting -form that once was flesh, while still making them -retain a disturbing trace of their former coma. You -remember this form—separated into hairsbreadths of -worship and laceration by stunted men?”</p> - -<p>“Your description of living imagination is perfect,” -he said. “It will be minutely disagreeable to follow -your orders, but let us complete the task quickly.”</p> - -<p>They looked away from each other, immersed in the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_70" id="Page_70">[70]</a></span> -strain of their inner labours. The room disappeared in -large pieces that receded to the background of a gray -substance, and consciousness left their bodies. Her body -faded out while his solidified to flesh draped by the -clumsy fears of clothes. Then the gray substance slowly -adopted the shapes, colours, and details of a railroad station. -Once more he was a suffering and encumbered -poet, standing in the battling race of people and waiting -for the train that would bring her to Detroit, Michigan. -He paced up and down the cement platform, erasing his -thoughts with the long strokes of his limbs and obsessed -only by the belief that he was walking nearer to her -in this fashion, since he was weary of being over-awed -by distance. Because he did not associate her qualities -and thoughts with those of other people he could never -convince himself that she was real unless she stood -beside him and spoke, and when her body was absent -she became the unreal confirmation of his desires—a -dream to which he had given the plausible tricks of -flesh and voice. Only the return of these two things -could reassure him, for she was to him far too delicately -exact and mentally unperturbed to exist actually in -the sweating, dense, malaria-saturated revolutions of a -world.</p> - -<p>The train arrived and he stood near the gate. People -streamed out—a regiment disbanded after a lonely and -forced conflict with thought in uncomfortable seats, or -with diluted chatter that fascinated their inner emptiness. -They were the people whose vast insistence and blundering -control of the earth made him doubt the reality of -the woman whom he loved. Oh, to feel once more certain -that she was human—that her incredibly tenuous aloofness -could stoop to the shields of flesh! Yes, she would -come now, an alien straggler passively submitting to the -momentum of a regiment of people. When she failed<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_71" id="Page_71">[71]</a></span> -to appear he still lingered near the gate, inventing practical -reasons for her absence—the packing of baggage, -a delayed toilette. The iron gates shut with a thud -that was to him the boot-sound of reality against his -head.</p> - -<p>He bought a newspaper; sat down in the waiting-room; -and sought to submerge his distress in the hasty -and distorted versions of murders, robberies, scandals, -controversies, and machinations that defiled white sheets -of paper. But he could see nothing save a hazy host -of men fighting against or accepting the complexly sinister -fever that made them mutilate each other, and -weary of this often-repeated vision he dropped the paper. -His mind gathered itself to that tight and aching lunge -known as emotion, and morbidly he involved her in -disasters—train-wrecks, suicide, the assault of another -person. He began to feel that melodrama was the only -overwhelming sincerity in a tangle of crafty or poorly -adjusted disguises, and his emotional activity fed eagerly -upon this belief. All of the paraphernalia of fatalism -rose before his eyes—the small, lit stage with its puppets; -the myriads of strings extending into a frame of -darkness and pulled by invisible hands; the sudden -and prearranged descent of catastrophe; the laughter of -an audience of gods, examining the spectacle with a -mixture of sardonic and bored moments. But abruptly -he felt that these were merely the devices of a self-pity -that sought to raise its stature by imagining itself the -victim of a sublime conspiracy. He whistled some bars -of a popular song, deliberately snatching at an inane -relief from the industries of his mind. Then he walked -back to the gates and waited for the next train, which -was about to arrive. Once more the importantly fatigued -stream of people; once more her absence. He had turned -away from the gate when her hand questioned his -shoulder.</p> - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_72" id="Page_72">[72]</a></span>“And so you are real and I have not been deceived,” -he said.</p> - -<p>“I am as real as you care to make me,” she answered. -“I was hunting for a comb in my valise when the train -came in. Combs always elude me.”</p> - -<p>She mentioned the name of a hotel and they walked -to it in silence, for speech to them demanded an impregnable -privacy that was violated by even the swiftly -passing eyes and ears of other people. When they were -alone in the hotel-room he watched her remove outer -garments and don a kimono, with a pleasure that coerced -sensual longing into an enslaved contemplation—a fire -that glowed without burning.</p> - -<p>“When I see your flesh then you are most unreal,” -he said. “It becomes a last garment that you have -neglected to unfasten because you wish to pretend that -you belong to the earth. The cupped appeal of your -breasts is the subtle lie with which something infinitely -abstract evades the weight of a world. There is a surprised -element attached to your legs and they never -seem assured in their task of supporting your torso. -And yet, when your body is beyond my actual sight -your reality is still doubtful, for then I lack even the uncertain -evidence of your flesh. I am helpless—I cannot -mingle you with cities and men, and even country roads -seem heavily unwilling to hold you.”</p> - -<p>“And is it impossible for you to accept this body as -a necessary, insincere contrast to my thoughts and emotions?” -she asked, with lightness. “You are tensely -morbid, Max. Now I shall sit on your knee. The scene -is prearranged. You must promptly clutch me, in that -involved manner that has made novelists famous and -blurred the integrity of poets. The earth has anointed -and pointed riots waiting for you!”</p> - -<p>His fingers studied the short brown curls on her head<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_73" id="Page_73">[73]</a></span> -and his lips touched the less obvious parts of her face—her -chin, the tip of her inwardly curving nose, her temples, -the meeting-place of forehead and hair.</p> - -<p>“I can see two men looking at me now,” he said. -“To one I am an emasculated fool who places a dainty -overtone upon his weakness, and to the other I am chaining -strong desires with the lies of vain and pretty gestures. -Olga, the earth is bulky and profane, and dreads -anything that delicately, aloofly disputes its size!”</p> - -<p>She carefully fitted her head between his shoulder -and neck.</p> - -<p>“This listening peace that you bring me, and the -softer intentions of your hands, they are more important -than the lunges of men,” she said. “We are spontaneous -in ways whose breathlike intensity has not been -corrupted by the screaming of nerves, and Oh, we must -prepare ourselves for the indifference and ridicules of -a coarser audience. They cannot peer into this room, -yet afterwards something within the buoyant removal of -our bodies tells them to punish us with poverty and little -food.”</p> - -<p>He grinned, and crowded flights of defiance were on -his face.</p> - -<p>“I’ve been eating onions and bread for the last week,” -he said. “I cut the onions into various shapes, making -them resemble different articles of food. With an imaginative -seriousness one can almost overcome the sense -of taste. Almost.”</p> - -<p>“It is only that word that keeps us here,” she said. -“We are almost free illusions.”</p> - -<p>She walked to the bureau and brushed her hair, for -she did not want him to see an expression on her face. -He guessed it and became repentantly merry.</p> - -<p>“Sold a poem two weeks ago,” he said. “The editor -wrote something about ‘great originality but rather -tenuous’ and ‘this is not a spiritual age.’ It isn’t.”</p> - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_74" id="Page_74">[74]</a></span>“Let me hear it,” she said.</p> - -<p>It concerned a circle of men dumped into chairs in -the lobby of a cheap lodging-house—rag-dolls twitching -now and then, as though an outside hand were poking -them with curiosity. Then the spirit of the lodging-house, -sallow and indecently shallow, sidled into the -lobby, correctly aimed its tobacco at a spitoon, and gave -the dolls snores to create a false appearance of life, whereupon -one of them rose and cursed the invisible intruder -in his sleep. The spirit of the lodging-house, frightened -and angry at the appearance of a soul whose existence it -had not imagined, whisked them all off to the torture -of their beds. The poem had spoken to Baudelaire and -Dostoyevsky but within it a stunned hatred of the world -was experimenting with appropriate symbols.</p> - -<p>“Irrelevantly, perhaps, I’m thinking of a time when -I washed dishes in a lunch-room in St. Louis,” she said. -“I was hunting in my mind for something that could -deceive the greasy monotone of defiled chinaware. -Suddenly the brown and turbid dish-water became a -heavy wine, spiced with the aftermaths of earthly pleasures—decay -to which a spiritual release had given a -liquid significance. I became obsessed by the verity of -this idea, and finally, quite entranced, I raised the pan -of dirty water to my lips and was about to drink it when, -at that moment, the proprietor came in. He squawked -‘crazee-e,’ ‘crazee-e,’ and discharged me. I wrote an -excellent poem about it, though.”</p> - -<p>“Let’s see, what would they say about this,” he -muttered. “Neurasthenia, insanity, exalted paranoia, -minor conceit, trivial pose, empty fantasy—they have so -many putrid labels to hide the inner rage, damn them!”</p> - -<p>They swayed together in the chair, like two babies -in a trap, taking the small amount of room possible in -the cramped abode.</p> - - - -<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_75" id="Page_75">[75]</a></span>“Tomorrow we’ll look for work,” she said. “The -breath-tablets that you bought to hide the scent of onions -have not been able to eradicate a last melodramatic -trace of their enemy. We must move our arms to ward -off such meaningless intrusions.”</p> - -<p>“With an excellent verbosity you mock the concentration -of your thoughts,” he said.</p> - -<p>They closed their eyes and grew still in the chair. -When at last they stirred, each one looked first at the -room and then at the other person, with a gradually -slain disbelief.</p> - -<p>“We are not dead after all,” he cried. “The room -does not fade away!”</p> - -<p>They sat without moving, while happiness and sadness -sprang into combat within them.</p> - - -<hr class="chap" /> -<div class="transnote"> -<p class="ph2">TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:</p> - - -<p>Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.</p> - -<p>Unmatched opening quotation marks on page 17 have been retained from the original, as the transcriber -could not ascertain exactly where the closing quotation marks, missing in the original, should be placed.</p> -</div> - - - - - - - - -<pre> - - - - - -End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Against This Age, by Maxwell Bodenheim - -*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK AGAINST THIS AGE *** - -***** This file should be named 60044-h.htm or 60044-h.zip ***** -This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: - http://www.gutenberg.org/6/0/0/4/60044/ - -Produced by Tim Lindell, David E. 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