Poetry

By Mina Loy.

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There Is No Life or Death

There is no Life or Death,
Only activity
And in the absolute
Is no declivity.
There is no Love or Lust
Only propensity
Who would possess
Is a nonentity.
There is no First or Last
Only equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.
There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity.

Parturition

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without.
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension

I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait-painter
Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment
Sings
“All the girls are tid’ly did’ly
All the girls are nice
Whether they wear their hair in curls
Or⁠—”
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception Brute
Why?
The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.
He is running up-stairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes.
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night-hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation

Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?

A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life
Life
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted maternity
Against my thigh
Touch of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was⁠—is⁠—ever⁠—shall⁠—be
Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life⁠—stir
I am that cat

Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue-bottles
—Epicurean⁠—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding

The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware

Italian Pictures

July in Vallombrosa

Old lady sitting still
Pine trees standing quite still
Sisters of mercy whispering
Oust the Dryad

O consecration of forest
To the uneventful

I cannot imagine anything
Less disputably respectable
Than prolonged invalidism in Italy
At the beck
Of a British practitioner

Of all permissible pastimes
Attendant upon chastity
The one with which you can most efficiently insult
Life
Is your hobby of collecting death-beds
Blue Nun

So wrap the body in flannel and wool
Of superior quality from the Anglo-American
Until that ineffable moment
When Rigor Mortis
Divests it of its innate impurity

While round the hotel
Wanton Italian matrons
Discuss the better business of bed-linen
To regular puncture of needles

The old lady has a daughter
Who has been spent
In chasing moments from one room to another
When the essence of an hour
Was in its passing
With the passionate breath
Of the bronchitis kettle
And her last little lust
Lost itself in a saucer of gruel

But all this moribund stuff
Is not wasted
For there is always Nature
So its expensive upkeep
Goes to support
The loves
Of head-waiters

The Costa San Giorgio

We English make a tepid blot
On the messiness
Of the passionate Italian life-traffic
Throbbing the street up steep
Up up to the porta
Culminating
In the stained fresco of the dragon-slayer

The hips of women sway
Among the crawling children they produce
And the church hits the barracks
Where
The greyness of marching men
Falls through the greyness of stone

Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
Broken heads and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves
Shaving
Ice cream
Licking is larger than mouths
Boots than feet
Slip Slap and the string dragging
And the angle of the sun
Cuts the whole lot in half

And warms the folded hands
Of a consumptive
Left outside her chair is broken
And she wonders how we feel
For we walk very quickly
The noonday cannon
Having scattered the neighbour’s pigeons

The smell of small cooking
From luckier houses
Is cruel to the maimed cat
Hiding
Among carpenter’s shavings
From three boys
—One holding a bar⁠—
Who nevertheless
Born of human parents
Cry when locked in the dark

Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street
Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion

For there is little to do
The false pillow-spreads
Hugely initialed
Already adjusted
On matrimonial beds
And the glint on the china virgin
Consummately dusted

Having been thrown
Anything or something
That might have contaminated intimacy
Out
Onto the middle of the street

Costa Magic

Her father
Indisposed to her marriage
And a rabid man at that
My most sympathetic daughter⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Make yourself a conception
As large as this one
Here
But with yellow hair

From the house
Issuing Sunday dressed
Combed precisely
Splosh!
Pours something
Viscuous
Malefic
Unfamiliar

While listening up I hear my husband
Mumbling Mumbling
Mumbling at the window
Malediction
Incantation

Under an hour
Her hand to her side pressing
Suffering
Being bewitched
Cesira fading
Daily daily feeble softer

The doctor⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠— “Phthisis”
The wise woman says to take her
So we following her instruction
I and the neighbour
Take her⁠—

The glass rattling
The rain slipping
I and the neighbour and her aunt
Bunched together
And Cesira
Droops across the cab

Fields and houses
Pass like the pulling out
Of sweetmeat ribbon
From a rascal’s mouth
Till
A wheel in a rut
Jerks back my girl on the padding
And the hedges into the sky

Coming to the magic tree

Cesira becomes as a wild beast
A tree of age

“If Cesira should not become as a wild beast
It is merely Phthisis”
This being the wise woman’s instruction

Knowing she has to die
We drive home
To wait
She certainly does in time

It is unnatural in a Father
Bewitching a daughter
Whose hair down covers her thighs.

Three Moments in Paris

One O’Clock at Night

Though you had never possessed me
I had belonged to you since the beginning of time
And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you
Leaning against your shoulder
And your careless arm across my back gesticulated
As your indisputable male voice roared
Through my brain and my body
Arguing dynamic decomposition
Of which I was understanding nothing
Sleepily
And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect
Boomed as it seemed to me so sleepy
Across an interval of a thousand miles
An interim of a thousand years
But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you clear your throat
Deafening woke me
And I caught the thread of the argument
Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude
And ceased to be a woman

Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman
The animal woman
Understanding nothing of man
But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat
Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics
Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children
Or the thunder of alien gods
But you woke me up
Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity

“Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.”

Café du Néant

Little tapers lighted leaning diagonally
Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant
Leaning to the breath of baited bodies
Like young poplars fringing the Loire

Eyes that are full of love
And eyes that are full of kohl
Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente
Trailing the rest of the animal behind them
Telling of tales without words
And lies of no consequence
One way or another

The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black
To black cravat
To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat
What color could have been your bodies
When last you put them away

Nostalgic youth
Holding your mistress’s pricked finger
In the indifferent flame of the taper
Synthetic symbol of life
In this factitious chamber of death
The woman
As usual
Is smiling as bravely
As it is given to her to be brave
While the brandy cherries
In winking glasses
Are decomposing
Harmoniously
With the flesh of spectators
And at a given spot

There is one
Who
Having the concentric lighting focused precisely upon her
Prophetically blossoms in perfect putrefaction
Yet there are cabs outside the door.

Magasins du Louvre

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass

Long lines of boxes
Of dolls
Propped against banisters
Walls and pillars
Huddled on shelves
And composite babies with arms extended
Hang from the ceiling
Beckoning
Smiling
In a profound silence
Which the shop walker left trailing behind him
When he ambled to the further end of the gallery
To annoy the shop-girl

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass
They alone have the effrontery to
Stare through the human soul
Seeing nothing
Between parted fringes

One cocotte wears a bowler hat and a sham camellia
And one an iridescent boa
For there are two of them
Passing
And the solicitous mouth of one is straight
The other curved to a static smile
They see the dolls
And for a moment their eyes relax
To a flicker of elements unconditionally primeval
And now averted
Seek each other’s surreptitiously
To know if the other has seen
While mine are inextricably entangled with the pattern of the carpet
As eyes are apt to be
In their shame
Having surprised a gesture that is ultimately intimate

All the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass.

Sketch of a Man on a Platform

Man of absolute physical equilibrium
You stand so straight on your legs
Every plank or clod you plant your feet on
Becomes roots for those limbs

Among the men you accrete to yourself
You are more heavy
And more light
Force being most equitably disposed
Is easiest to lift from the ground
So at the same time
Your movements
Unassailable
Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet
The essence of a Mademoiselle Genée
Winks in the to-and-fro of your cuff-links

Your projectile nose
Has meddled in the more serious business
Of the battle-field
With the same incautious aloofness
Of intense occupation
That it snuffles the trail of the female
And the comfortable
Passing odors of love

Your genius
So much less in your brain

Than in your body
Reinforcing the hitherto negligible
Qualities
Of life
Deals so exclusively with
The vital
That it is equally happy expressing itself
Through the activity of pushing
Things
In the opposite direction
To that which they are lethargically willing to go
As in the amative language
Of the eyes

Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any⁠—or all
Forms of creative idiosyncrasy
While the occasional snap
Of actual production
Stings the face of the public.

Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots

Latin Borghese

Houses hold virgins
The door’s on the chain

“Plumb streets with hearts”
“Bore curtains with eyes”

Virgins without dots1
Stare beyond probability

See the men pass
Their hats are not ours
We take a walk
They are going somewhere
And they may look everywhere
Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out

A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror
Something less to the confessional
The rest to Time
There is so much Time
Everything is full of it
Such a long time

Virgins may whisper
“Transparent nightdresses made all of lace”
Virgins may squeak
“My dear I should faint!”
Flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠… flutter⁠ ⁠.⁠ ⁠…
.⁠ ⁠… “And then the man⁠—”
Wasting our giggles
For we have no dots

We have been taught
Love is a god
White with soft wings
Nobody shouts
Virgins for sale
Yet where are our coins
For buying a purchaser
Love is a god
Marriage expensive
A secret well kept
Makes the noise of the world
Nature’s arms spread wide
Making room for us
Room for all of us
Somebody who was never
a virgin
Has bolted the door
Put curtains at our windows
See the men pass
They are going somewhere

Fleshes like weeds
Sprout in the light
So much flesh in the world
Wanders at will

Some behind curtains
Throbs to the night
Bait to the stars

Spread it with gold
And you carry it home
Against your shirt front
To a shaded light
With the door locked
Against virgins who
Might scratch

To You

The city
Wedged between impulse and unfolding
Bridged
By diurnal splintering
Of egos
Round
The aerial news-kiosk
Where you
Statically
Hob-nob
With a nigger
And a deaf-mute
Of introspection

Plopping finger
In Stephen’s ink
Made you hybrid-negro

A couple of manuscriptural erasures
And here we have your deaf-mute
Beseech him
He will never with-hold so
Completely
As the tattle of tongue-play
Or your incognito

Lit cavities in the face of the city
Open their glassy embrace to receive you
In your mask of unborn ebony
And the silence of your harangue

The tight-rope stretched above commotion
Frays to tow
To the step tentative
fend shadows are yours for the taking
Where the mono-rabble
Plays the one-stringed banjo
On the noise of its ragged heart
Inaudible
In the shattering city
Alien as your aboriginal
In the levelling dirt⁠—

Giovanni Franchi

The threewomen who all walked
In the same dress
And it had falling ferns on it
Skipped parallel
To the progress
Of Giovanni Franchi

Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked
Flickeringly as he flacked them
His wrists explained things
Infectiously by way of his adolescence
His adolescence was all there was of him
Whatever was left was rather awkward
His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees
Descended to the fallacious nobility
Of his first pair of trousers

They were tubular flapped friezily
The colour of coppered mustard
What matter
Were they not the first
No others could ever be the first again
The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen
Began fading as she thought of it
Tea-table problems for insane asylums
Are démodé
Démodé

Allow us to rely on our instincts

The threewomen was composed of three instincts
Each sniffing divergently directed draughts
The first instinct first again may
renascent gods save us from the enigmatic
penetralia of Firstness
Was to be faithful to a man first
The second to be loyal to herself first
She would have to find which self first
The third which might as well have been first
Was to find out how many toes the
philosopher Giovanni Bapini had first

Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born
You imagine what he looked like
Looked it as nearly as he could as the
philosopher looked
His articulations were excellent
Still where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous
Giovanni Franchi was merely pale

His acolytian sincerity
The sensitive down among his freckles
Fell in with the patriotic souls of flags
Red white and green flags filliping piazzas
When the “National Idea” arrived on the Milan Express
He scuttled winsomely
To its distribution from a puffer
For the declaration of War

Continually cutting off an angle from Paszkowski’s
Through plate-glass swingings
To look as busy bodily
As the philosopher’s brain was
As Giovanni Bapini importuned mobs
From monumental gums
To the sparky detritus
From the hurried cigarette
Of his disciple

Whose papa and mama kept a trattoria
Audaciously squatting right opposite the Pitti Palace
The Pitti Palace however stolid could hardly help noticing
Being an aristocrat it went on looking
As plainly piled up as ever
The Pitti Palace has never been known to mention the trattoria
Or mention Giovanni Franchi
Sitting in it
At a book
It could not see from that distance
Giovanni watching the munchers supporting his parents
With an eye
On assuring himself
Of their sufficient impression
By erudition

He was so young
That explains so much
No book ever explained what to be young is
But they look so much more important for that
Giovanni was in continuous exstacy
Induced by the imposing look of them
When Giovanni Bapini spoke of them
He could not tell
How completely more precious
Would be such knowledge
As how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had

Now the threewomen
For pity’s sake
Let us think of her as she to save time
Seeing the minor Giovanni
Sitting at the major Giovanni’s feet
Made sure he must be counting his toes
All to the contrary he was picking the philosopher’s brains
Happy in the security that when he had done
He would still be youthful enough to sort out his own

He listened at the elder’s lips
That taught him of earthquakes and women
Of women⁠⸻⁠⸻⁠⸻
His manners were abominable
He would kill a woman
Quite inconspicuously it is true
And neglect to attend her funeral
I mean the older man
And what he told
Giovanni Franchi
About these pernicious persons
Was so extremely good for him
It entirely spoilt his first love-affair
To such an extent it never came off

We have read of
Trattoria meaning eating house.
Piazzas or squares
The Pitti Palace enormous
And Paszkowski’s for beer
All are in Firenze
Firenze is Florence
Some think it is a woman with flowers in her hair
But no it is a city with stones on the streets

Giovanni Bapini often said
Everybody in Firenze knows me
And everybody did
Excepting⁠—That is she didn’t
She never knew what he was
Or how he was himself
Yet she uniquely was the one
To speculate upon the number of his toes
The days growing longer
Fulfilling her of curiosity

She made a moth’s-net
Of metaphor and miracles
And on the incandescent breath of civilizations
She chased by moon-and-morn light
Philosopher’s toes

As virginal as had he never worn them
Clear of “white marks mean money”
All quicks and cores
They fluttered to her fantasy
Fell into her lap
While she gathered her ferny flounces about them
They inappropriately passed

But Giovanni Franchi was there
He almost winked it at her
That he was there
His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets
The Philosopher had flung to him
And as she tripped by him
She guessed these all
All but the number of those toes

She made diurnal pilgrimage
To the trattoria
To eat
Trout that might have been trained for circuses
If minarets grew in miniature whirlpools
And mayonnaise that helped her to forget
That what is underneath need never matter

She put all minor riddles out of her
Such as
What was the under-cover of Franchi’s book
Telling to the plaid pattern of the table-cloth
Too shy to interrogate
She sent ambassadors
To the disciple
They returned
Oh rats
Quite manifest that Giovanni Franchi
Some semieffigy
Damned by scholiums
Knew no more how many toes⁠—
Than Giovanni Bapini knew himself

Babies in Hospital

I

Small Elena
Of shrunken limbs
And ample sex
Who
Having filched
The atrophied
Woman-smile of your mother
Scatter it
On the eating unseen
Tuberculous

Inaudible hands
On the counter-pane
It might have been
Impossible
Fingers should be so long
Being so tiny
But Nature
Needing no microscope
In her laboratory
Found it just as easy
Marshalling imperceptible
Hosts
To bone of your arm
Among overlapping of lint
Attaining a dignity
Unworthy of your years
Two and a half!

II

Hail to you
Bad little boy
Lying
In bound beauty
Of only a broken leg
And thank you
For throwing
Your bricks on the floor
For the third time
And the smack
You gave me
For the thermometer

Delightfully male
Already gallant
You smooth the mackintosh
For Elena to sit on beside you
Her fragility
Being irresistibly for you
You are very wise
Precocious coquette
Who never learnt to talk
To look at him
Before
Your semi-imbecile
Eyes shut
It is not given to each of us
To be desired.

III

Tend
Do not touch
Apparent flowers
Of festering secret
And the fly-by-nights
Such little things
I cannot be your mother
There are already
So many ignorances
I am not guilty of.

At the Door of the House

A thousand women’s eyes
Riveted to the unrealisable
Scatter the wash-stand of the card-teller
Defiled marble of Carrara
On which she spreads
Color-picture maps of destiny
In the corner
Of an inconducive bed-room

“Impassioned
Doubly impassioned
Sad
You see these three cards
But here is the double Victory
And there is an elderly lady
Ill in whom you are concerned
This is the Devil
And these two skeletons
Are mortifications
You are going to make a journey

At evening about love
Here is the Man of the Heart
Turning his shoulders to a lady
Covered with tears about matrimony

At the door of your house
There is a letter about an affair
And a bed and a table
And this ace of spades turned upside-down
‘With respect’
Means that some man
Has well you know
Intentions little honorable

Here you are covered with tears
For a deception
The Man of the Heart
Is in thoughtfulness for a letter
He will make a journey at evening
And really lady
I should say
It will not be long before you see him
For there he is at the door of the house

And look
Here are you
And here is he
In life and thought
At the door of the house”

Muddled among the aniline brightness of the Tauro cards

The wheels with wings
The rows on rows of goblets
Passionate magenta blossoms
Hermits —bring luck⁠—
Moons Prison-fortresses
Cudgels
A man cut in half
Means a deception
And the nude woman
Stands for the world

Those eyes

Of Petronilla Lucia Letizia
Felicita
Filomena Amalia
Orsola Geltrude Caterina Delfina
Zita Bibiana Tarsilla
Eufemia,
Looking for the little love-tale
That never came true
At the door of the house

The Effectual Marriage

Or, The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni

The door was an absurd thing
Yet it was passable
They quotidienly passed through it
It was this shape

Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows
They knew it was important to them
This being of who they were
They were themselves
Corporeally transcendentally consecutively
conjunctively and they were quite complete

In the evening they looked out of their two windows
Miovanni out of his library window
Gina from the kitchen window
From among his pots and pans
Where he so kindly kept her
Where she so wisely busied herself
Pots and Pans she cooked in them
All sorts of sialagogues
Some say that happy women are immaterial

So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative
an instigation of the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man
hidden beneath her hoop
Ho for the blue and red of her
The silent eyelids of her
The shiny smile of her

Ding dong said the bell
Miovanni Gina called
Would it be fitting for you to tell
the time for supper
Pooh said Miovanni I am
Outside time and space

Patience said Gina is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish appropriately delectable

What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans
One never asked the other
So they the wise ones eat their suppers in peace

Of what their peace consisted
We cannot say
Only that he was magnificently man
She insignificantly a woman who understood
Understanding what is that
To Each his entity to others
their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion
to the annexed their liberty
To man his work
To woman her love
Succulent meals and an occasional caress
So be it
It so seldom is

While Miovanni thought alone in the dark
Gina supposed that peeping she might see
A round light shining where his mind was
She never opened the door
Fearing that this might blind her
Or even
That she should see Nothing at all
So while he thought
She hung out of the window
Watching for falling stars
And when a star fell
She wished that still
Miovanni would love her to-morrow
And as Miovanni
Never gave any heed to the matter
He did

Gina was a woman
Who wanted everything
To be everything in woman
Everything everyway at once
Diurnally variegate
Miovanni always knew her
She was Gina
Gina who lent monogamy
With her fluctuant aspirations
A changeant consistency
Unexpected intangibilities

Miovanni remained
Monumentally the same
The same Miovanni
If he had become anything else
Gina’s world would have been at an end
Gina with no axis to revolve on
Must have dwindled to a full stop

In the mornings she dropped
Cool crystals
Through devotional fingers
Saccharine for his cup
And marketed
With a Basket
Trimmed with a red flannel flower
When she was lazy
She wrote a poem on the milk bill
The first strophe Good morning
The second Good night
Something not too difficult to
Learn by heart

The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table
Greasy cleanliness of the chopper board
The coloured vegetables
Intuited quality of flour
Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal
Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses
Pet simplicities of her Universe
Where circles were only round
Having no vices.

(This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman.

—⁠Forte dei Marmi)

Human Cylinders

The human cylinders
Revolving in the enervating dusk
That wraps each closer in the mystery
Of singularity
Among the litter of a sunless afternoon
Having eaten without tasting
Talked without communion
And at least two of us
Loved a very little
Without seeking
To know if our two miseries
In the lucid rush-together of automatons
Could form one opulent well-being

Simplifications of men
In the enervating dusk
Your indistinctness
Serves me the core of the kernel of you
When in the frenzied reaching-out of intellect to intellect
Leaning brow to brow communicative
Over the abyss of the potential
Concordance of respiration
Shames
Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory
And reciprocity
Of conception
And expression
Where each extrudes beyond the tangible
One thin pale trail of speculation
From among us we have sent out
Into the enervating dusk
One little whining beast
Whose longing
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
And one elastic tentacle of intuition
To quiver among the stars

The impartiality of the absolute
Routs the polemic
Or which of us
Would not
Receiving the holy-ghost
Catch it and caging
Lose it
Or in the problematic
Destroy the Universe
With a solution.

The Black Virginity

Baby Priests
On green sward
Yew-closed
Silk beaver
Rhythm of redemption
Fluttering of Breviaries

Fluted black silk cloaks
Hung square from shoulders
Truncated juvenility
Uniform segregation
Union in severity
Modulation
Intimidation
Pride of misapprehended preparation
Ebony statues training for immobility
Anaemic jawed
Wise saw to one another

Prettily the little ones
Gesticulate benignly upon one another in the sun buzz⁠—
Finger and thumb circles postulate pulpits
Profiles forsworn to Donatello
Munching tall talk vestral shop
Evangelical snobs
Uneasy dreaming
In hermetically-sealed dormitories
Not of me or you Sister Saraminta
Of no more or less
Than the fit of Pope’s mitres

It is an old religion that put us in our places
Here am I in lilac print
Preposterously no less than the world flesh and devil
Having no more idea what those are
What I am
Than Baby Priests of what “He” is
or they are⁠—
Messianic mites tripping measured latin ring-a-roses
Subjugated adolescence
Retraces loose steps to furling of Breviaries
In broiling shadows
The last with apostolic lurch
Tries for a high hung fruit
And misses
Anyway it is inedible
It is always thus
In the Public Garden.

Parallel lines
An old man
Eyeing a white muslin girl’s school
And all this
As pleasant as bewildering
Would not eventually meet
I am forever bewildered
Old men are often grown greedy⁠—
What nonsense
It is noon
And salvation’s seedlings
Are headed off for the refectory.

Lions’ Jaws

O far away on the Benign Peninsular
. . . . .
That automatic fancier of lyrical birds
Danriel Gabrunzio
with melodious magnolia
perfumes his mise-en-scène
where impotent neurotics
wince at the dusk

The national arch-angel
loved
several countesses
in a bath full of tuberoses
soothed by the orchestra
at the “Hotel Majestic Palace”

. . . the sobbing
from the psycho-pathic wards
of his abandoned harem
purveys amusement for “High Life”

The comet conqueror
showers upon continental libraries
translated stars . . .
accusations of the alcove
where
with a pomaded complaisance
he trims rococo liaisons . . .
. . . a tooth-tattoo of an Elvira
into a Maria’s flesh

And every noon
bare virgins riding alabaster donkeys
receive Danriel Gabrunzio
from the Adriatic
in a golden bath-towel
signed with the zodiac
in pink chenille

Defiance of old idolatries
inspires new schools
. . . .
Danriel Gabrunzio’s compatriots
concoct new courtships
to intrigue
the myriad-fleshed Mistress
of “the Celebrated”

The antique envious thunder
of Latin littérateurs
rivaling Gabrunzio’s satiety
burst in a manifesto
notifying women’s wombs
of Man’s immediate agamogenesis
. . . Insurance
of his spiritual integrity
against the carnivorous courtesan
. . . Manifesto
of the flabbergast movement
hurled by the leader Raminetti
to crash upon the audacious lightning
of Gabrunzio’s fashions in lechery
. . . and wheedle its inevitable way
to the “excepted” woman’s heart
her cautious pride
extorting betrayal
of Woman wholesale
to warrant her surrender
with a sense of . . . Victory

Raminetti
cracked the whip of the circus-master
astride a prismatic locomotive
ramping the tottering platform
of the Arts
of which this conjuring commercial traveller
imported some novelties from
Paris in his pocket . . .
souvenirs for his disciples
to flaunt
at his dynamic carnival

The erudite Bapini
experimenting
in auto-hypnotic God-head
on a mountain
rolls off as Raminetti’s plastic velocity
explodes his crust
of library dust
and hurrying threatening nakedness
to a vermilion ambush
in flabbergastism
. . . he kisses Raminetti
full on his oratory
in the arena
rather fancying Himself
in the awesome proportions
of an eclectic mother-in-law
to a raw ménage.

Thus academically chaperoned
the flabbergasts
blaze from obscurity
to deny their creed in cosy corners
to every feminine opportunity
and Raminetti
anxious to get a move on this beating-Gabrunzio-business
possesses the women of two generations
except a few
who jump the train at the next station . . .
. . . while the competitive Bapini
publishes a pretty comment
involving woman in the plumber’s art
and advertises
his ugliness as an excellent aphrodisiac

Shall manoeuvres in the new manner
pass unremarked?
. . .
These amusing men
discover in their mail
duplicate petitions
to be the lurid mother of “their” flabbergast child
from Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias
Imna Oly
(secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause)
. . . .
While flabbergastism boils over
and Ram: and Bap:
avoid each other’s sounds
This Duplex-Conquest
claims a “sort of success”
for the Gabrunzio resisters.

Envoi

Raminetti gets short sentences
for obstructing public thoroughfares
Bapini is popular in Vanity Fair
As for Imna Oly . . .
I agree with Mrs. Krar Standing Hail
She is not quite a lady. . . .
. . . . .
Riding the sunset
Danriel Gabrunzio
corrects
the lewd precocity
of Raminetti and Bapini
with his sonorous violation of Fiume
and drops his eye
into the fatal lap
of Italy.

Ignoramus

Shut it up

Sing silence
To destiny
Give half-a-crown
To a magician
Half a glance
To window-eclipse
And count the glumes
Of your day’s bargaining
Lying
In the lining
Of your pocket
While compromising
Between the perpendicular and horizontal
Some other tramp
Leans against
The night-nursery of trams

Puffs of black night
Quiver the neck
Of the Clown of Fortune
Dribble out of his trouser-ends
In dust-to-dust
Till cock-kingdom-come-crow
You can hear the heart-beating
Accoupling
of the masculine and feminine
Universal principles
Mating
And the martyrdom of morning
Caged with the love of houseflies
The avidity of youth
And incommensuration.

Day-spring
Bursting on repetition
“My friend the Sun
You have probably met before”
Or breakfasting on rain
You hurry
To interpolate
The over-growth
Of vegetation
With a walking stick

Or smear a friend
With a greasy residuum
From boiling your soul down
You can walk to Empyrean to-gether
Under the same
Oil-silk umbrella

“I must have you
Count stars for me
Out of their numeral excess
Please keep the brightest
For the last”

Songs to Joannes

I

Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of Experience
Coloured glass

II

The skin-sack
In which a wanton duality
Packed
All the completion of my infructuous impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced
My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair
A God’s door-mat
On the threshold of your mind

III

We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill’d on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings

IV

Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom’s eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair

One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose’s wings

But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
—Sweeping the brood clean out

V

Midnight empties the street
Of all but us
Three
I am undecided which way back
To the left a boy
—One wing has been washed in rain
The other will never be clean any more⁠—
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
—The poor can’t wash in hot water⁠—
And I don’t know which turning to take
Since you got home to yourself⁠—first

VI

I know the Wire-Puller intimately
And if it were not for the people
On whom you keep one eye
You could look straight at me
And Time would be set back

VII

My pair of feet
Smack the flag-stones
That are something left over from your walking
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

VIII

I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Behind God’s eyes
There might
Be other lights

IX

When we lifted
Our eye-lids on Love
A cosmos
Of coloured voices
And laughing honey

And spermatozoa
At the core of Nothing
In the milk of the Moon

X

Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn

XI

Dear one at your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands

XII

Voices break on the confines of passion
Desire Suspicion Man Woman
Solve in the humid carnage

Flesh from flesh
Draws the inseparable delight
Kissing at gasps to catch it

Is it true
That I have set you apart
Inviolate in an utter crystallization
Of all the jolting of the crowd
Taught me willingly to live to share

Or are you
Only the other half
Of an ego’s necessity
Scourging pride with compassion
To the shallow sound of dissonance
And boom of escaping breath

XIII

Come to me There is something
I have got to tell you and I can’t tell
Something taking shape
Something that has a new name
A new dimension
A new use
A new illusion

It is ambient And it is in your eyes
Something shiny Something only for you
Something that I must not see

It is in my ears Something very resonant
Something that you must not hear
Something only for me

Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations
Disorb inviolate egos

Where two or three are welded together
They shall become god
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Oh that’s right
Keep away from me Please give me a push
Don’t let me understand you Don’t realise me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me you⁠ ⁠—⁠ you⁠ ⁠—⁠ me

XIV

Today
Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible
To you
I bring the nascent virginity of
—Myself for the moment

No love or the other thing
Only the impact of lighted bodies
Knocking sparks off each other
In chaos

XV

Seldom Trying for Love
Fantasy dealt them out as gods
Two or three men looked only human

But you alone
Superhuman apparently
I had to be caught in the weak eddy
Of your drivelling humanity
To love you most

XVI

We might have lived together
In the lights of the Arno
Or gone apple stealing under the sea
Or played
Hide and seek in love and cob-webs
And a lullaby on a tin-pan

And talked till there were no more tongues
To talk with
And never have known any better

XVII

I don’t care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut

Red a warm colour on the battle-field
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round vacuum
Dilating with my breath

XVIII

Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night

XIX

Nothing so conserving
As cool cleaving
Note of the Q H U
Clear carving
Breath-giving
Pollen smelling
Space

White telling
Of slaking
Drinkable
Through fingers
Running water
Grass haulms
Grow to

Leading astray
Of fireflies
Aerial quadrille
Bouncing
Off one another
Again conjoining
In recaptured pulses
Of light

You too
Had something
At that time
Of a green-lit glow-worm
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Yet slowly drenched
To raylessness
In rain

XX

Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern

XXI

I store up nights against you
Heavy with shut-flower’s nightmares
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Stack noons
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun

XXII

Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager’s revival
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
And flowered flummery
Breaks
To my silly shoes

In ways without you
I go
Gracelessly
As things go

XXIII

Laughter in solution
Stars in a stare
Irredeemable pledges
Of pubescent consummations
Rot
To the recurrent moon
Bleach
To the pure white
Wickedness of pain

XXIV

The procreative truth of Me
Petered out
In pestilent
Tear drops
Little lusts and lucidities
And prayerful lies
Muddled with the heinous acerbity
Of your street-corner smile

XXV

Licking the Arno
The little rosy
Tongue of Dawn
Interferes with our eyelashes
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
We twiddle to it
Round and round
Faster
And turn into machines

Till the sun
Subsides in shining
Melts some of us
Into abysmal pigeon-holes
Passion has bored
In warmth

Some few of us
Grow to the level of cool plains
Cutting our foot-hold
With steel eyes

XXVI

Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes

We sidle up
To Nature
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠that irate pornographist

XXVII

Nucleus Nothing
Inconceivable concept
Insentient repose
The hands of races
Drop off from
Immodifiable plastic

The contents
Of our ephemeral conjunction
In aloofness from Much
Flowed to approachment of⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Nothing
There was a man and a woman
In the way
While the Irresolvable
Rubbed with our daily deaths
Impossible eyes

XXVIII

The steps go up forever
And they are white
And the first step is the last white
Forever
Coloured conclusions
Smelt to synthetic
Whiteness
Of my
Emergence
And I am burnt quite white
In the climacteric
Withdrawal of your sun
And wills and words all white
Suffuse
Illimitable monotone

White where there is nothing to see
But a white towel
Wipes the cymophanous sweat
—Mist rise of living⁠—
From your
Etiolate body
And the white dawn
Of your New Day
Shuts down on me

Unthinkable that white over there
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠Is smoke from your house

XXIX

Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude

Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon

Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccups
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiencies
Begging dorsal vertebrae

Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blurr
Anything
Than seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other

Let them clash together
From the incognitoes
In seismic orgasm

For far further
Differentiation
Rather than watch
Own-self distortion
Wince in the alien ego

XXX

In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Foetal buffoons
Caught tricks
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And most of Nature is green
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

What guaranty
For the proto-form
We fumble
Our souvenir ethics to
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

XXXI

Crucifixion
Of a busy-body
Longing to interfere so
With the intimacies
Of your insolent isolation

Crucifixion
Of an illegal ego’s
Eclosion
On your equilibrium
Caryatid of an idea

Crucifixion
Wracked arms
Index extremities
In vacuum
To the unbroken fall

XXXII

The moon is cold
Joannes
Where the Mediterranean⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

XXXIII

The prig of passion⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
To your professorial paucity

Proto-plasm was raving mad
Evolving us⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

XXXIV

Love⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠the preeminent litterateur

The Dead

We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off

Of infinite elastic
Walking the ceiling
Our eyelashes polish stars

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle
Of a descendant
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams

Fixing the extension of your reactions
Our shadow lengthens
In your fear

You are so old
Born in our immortality
Stuck fast as Life
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension

We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness

Having swallowed your irate hungers
Satisfied before bread-breaking
To your dissolution
We splinter into Wholes
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries
In our busy ashbins
Stink the melodies
Of your
So easily reducible
Adolescences

Our tissue is of that which escapes you
Birth-Breaths and orgasms
The shattering tremor of the static
The far-shore of an instant
The unsurpassable openness of the circle
Legerdemain of God

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours

The mouthed echoes of what
Has exuded to our companionship
Is horrible to the ear
Of the half that is left inside them.

O Hell

To clear the drifts of spring
of our forbears’ excrements
and bury the subconscious archives
under unaffected flowers

Indeed⁠—
our person is a covered entrance to infinity
choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods
caress the sanctity of Adolescence
in the shaft to the sun.

Mexican Desert

The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive
trailing her rattling wooden tail
into the jazz-band sunset.⁠ ⁠…

The mountains in a row
set pinnacles of ferocious isolation
under the alien hot heaven

Vegetable cripples of drought
thrust up the parching appeal
cracking open the earth
stump-fingered cacti
and hunch-back palm trees
belabour the cinders of twilight.⁠ ⁠…

Perlun

the whipper snapper child of the sun
His pert blonde spirit
scoured by the Scandinavian Boreas
His head
an adolescent oval
ostrich egg
The victorious silly beauty of his face
awakens to his instincts

A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold
he puts the world
to the test of intuition

Smiling from ear to ear
Living from other hands to mouth

Holding in immaculate arms
the syphilitic sailor
on his avoided death bunk
or the movie vamp
among the muffled shadows of the shrubberies⁠⸺

Picking lemons in Los Angeles broke

The education of “Prince Fils à Papa”
How low men die
How women love⁠—
The rituals of Dempsey and Carpentier

Perlun
asks “Do these flappers of the millionaires
think I’m a doll for anyone to pat?”

Poe

a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights

sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights

Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles

sing burial rites

Apology of Genius

Ostracized as we are with God⁠—
The watchers of the civilized wastes
reverse their signals on our track

Lepers of the moon
all magically diseased
we come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores

unknowing
how perturbing lights
our spirit
on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty

Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws

You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny⁠—

The cuirass of the soul
still shines⁠—
And we are unaware
if you confuse
such brief
corrosion with possession

In the raw caverns of the Increate
we forge the dusk of Chaos
to that imperious jewelry of the Universe
—the Beautiful⁠—

While to your eyes
A delicate crop
of criminal mystic immortelles
stands to the censor’s scythe.

Brâncuși’s Golden Bird

The toy
become the aesthetic archetype

As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal

A naked orientation
unwinged unplumed
—⁠ ⁠the ultimate rhythm
has lopped the extremities
of crest and claw
from
the nucleus of flight

The absolute act
of art
conformed
to continent sculpture
—⁠ ⁠bare as the brow of Osiris⁠ ⁠—
this breast of revelation
an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames
in labyrinths of reflections
This gong
of polished hyper aesthesia
shrills with brass
as the aggressive light
strikes
its significance

The immaculate
conception
of the inaudible bird
occurs
in gorgeous reticence⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And “Immortality”
mildews⁠ ⁠…
in the museums of the moon

“Nocturnal cyclops”
“Crystal concubine”
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

Joyce’s Ulysses

The Normal Monster
sings in the Green Sahara

The voice and offal
of the image of God

make Celtic noises
in these lyrical hells

Hurricanes
of reasoned musics
reap the uncensored earth

The loquent consciousness
of living things
pours in torrential languages

The elderly colloquists
the Spirit and the Flesh
are out of tongue⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

The Spirit
is impaled upon the phallus

Phoenix
of Irish fires
lighten the Occident

with Ireland’s wings
flap pandemoniums
of Olympian prose

and satirise
the imperial Rose
of Gaelic perfumes
—⁠ England
the sadistic mother
embraces Erin⁠ ⁠—

Master
of meteoric idiom
present

The word made flesh
and feeding upon itself
with erudite fangs
The sanguine
introspection of the womb

Don Juan
of Judea
upon a pilgrimage
to the Libido

The Press⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
purring
its lullabyes to sanity

Christ capitalised
scourging
incontrite usurers of destiny
—⁠ in hole and corner temples

And hang
The soul’s advertisements
outside the ecclesiast’s Zoo

A gravid day
spawns
guttural gargoyles
upon the Tower of Babel

Empyrean emporium
where the
rejector⁠ ⁠—⁠ recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub rosâ⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

Crab-Angel

An atomic sprite
perched on a polished
monster-stallion
reigns over Ringling’s revolving
trinity of circus attractions

Something the contour
of a captured crab
waving its useless pearly claws

From a squat body
pygmy arms
and bow legs
with their baroque calves
curve in a bi-circular attitude
to a ballerina’s exstacy

An effigy of Christmas Eves
smile-cast among chrysanthemum curls
it seems a sugar angel
while from a rose flecked ruff of gauze
its manly legs
stamp on the vast rump of the horse

An iridescent speck
dripped from a rainbow
onto an ebony cloud

Crab-Angel I christen you
minnikin of masquerade sex

Helen of Lilliput?
Hercules in a powder puff?

Song

“Had you been born
in regions of the Unicorn
To balance on his ivory horn
perhaps⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠”
“Per Bacco! ’Tis an idiot dwarf
hooked to a wire to make him jump”

Automaton bare-back rider
the circus-master
jerks
your invisible pendulence
from an over-head pulley
to your illusory
leaps in up-a-loft

signs
the horse
racing the orchestra
in rushing show
throw
his whimsy wire-hung dominator

to dart
through circus skies of arc-lit dust
Crab-Angel like a swimming star

clutching the tail end of the Chimera
An aerial acrobat
floats on the coiling lightning
of the whirligig

lifts
to the elated symmetry of Flight⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

A startled rose
whirls in the chaos of the hoofs

The jeering jangling
jazz
crashes to silence

The dwarf⁠—
subsides like an ironic sigh
to the soft earth
and ploughs
his bow-legged way
laboriously towards the exit
waving a yellow farewell with his perruque

Der Blinde Junge

The dam Bellona
littered
her eyeless offspring
Kriegsopfer
upon the pavements of Vienna

Sparkling precipitate
the spectral day
involves
the visionless obstacle

this slow blind face
pushing
its virginal nonentity
against the light

Pure purposeless eremite
of centripetal sentience

Upon the carnose horologe of the ego
the vibrant tendon index moves not

since the black lightning desecrated
the retinal altar

Void and extinct
this planet of the soul
strains from the craving throat
in static flight upslanting

A downy youth’s snout
nozzling the sun
drowned in dumbfounded instinct

Listen!
illuminati of the coloured earth
How this expressionless “thing”
blows out damnation and concussive dark

Upon a mouth-organ

The Starry Sky of Wyndham Lewis

who raised
these rocks of human mist

pyramidical survivors
in the cyclorama of space

In the
austere theatre of the Infinite
the ghosts of the stars
perform the “Presence”

Their celibate shadows
fall
upon the aged radiance
of suns and moons

—The nerves of Heaven
flinching
from the antennae
of the intellect
—the rays
that pierce
the nocturnal heart
The airy eyes of angels
the sublime
experiment in pointillism
faded away

The celestial conservatories
blooming with light
are all blown out

Enviable immigrants
into the pure dimension
immune serene
devourers of the morning stars of Job

Jehovah’s seven days
err in your silent entrails
of geometric Chimeras

The Nirvanic snows
drift⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
to sky worn images

Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose

Exodus

Exodus lay under an oak-tree
Bordering on Buda Pest he had lain
him down to over-night under the lofty rain
of starlight
having leapt from the womb
eighteen years ago and grown
neglected along the shores of the Danube
on the Danube in the Danube
—or breaking his legs behind runaway horses⁠—
with a Carnival quirk
every Shrove Tuesday

Of his riches
a Patriarch
erected a synagogue
— —for the people
His son
looked upon Lea
— — of the people
she sat in Synagogue
—her hair long as the Talmud
—her tamarind eyes⁠— —
and disinherited
begat this Exodus

Imperial Austria taught the child
the German secret patriotism
the Magyar tongue the father
stuffed him with biblical Hebrew and the
seeds of science exhorting him
to vindicate
his forefather’s ambitions

The child
flowered precociously fever
smote the father
the widowed mother
took to her bosom a spouse
of her own sphere
and hired
Exodus in apprenticeship
to such as garrulously inarticulate
ignore the cosmic cultures

Sinister foster-parents
who lashed the boy
to that paralysis of
the spiritual apparatus
common to
the poor
The arid gravid
intellect of jewish ancestors
the senile juvenile
calculating prodigies of Jehovah
—Crushed by the Occident ox
they scraped
the gold gold golden
muck from off its hoofs⁠—

moves Exodus to emmigrate
coveting the alien
asylum of voluntary military
service paradise of the pound-stirling
where the domestic Jew in lieu
of knouts is lashed with tongues

The cannibal God
shutters his lids of night on the day’s gluttony
the partially devoured humanity
warms its unblessed beds with bare prostrations

An insect from an herb
errs on the man-mountain
imparts its infinitesimal tactile stimulus
to the epiderm to the spirit
of Exodus
stirring the anaesthetised load
of racial instinct frustrated
impulse infantile impacts with unreason
on his unconscious

Blinking his eyes⁠— — —
at sunrise Exodus
lumbar-aching sleep logged turns his ear
to the grit earth and hears
the boom of cardiac cataracts
thumping the turf
with his young pulse

He is undone! How should he know
he has a heart The Danube
gives no instruction in anatomy⁠—
the primary
throb of the animate
a beating mystery
pounds on his ignorance
in seeming
death dealing⁠—

The frightened fatalist
clenches his eyes
for the involuntary sacrifice
stark
to the sun-zumm dirges of
a bee
he lays him out
for his heart-beats to slay him

It is not accomplished
the burning track
of lengthening sun shafts
spur
This lying-in-state of a virility
to rise
and in his surprised
protracted viability
shoulder his pack

Exodus whose initiations
in arrogance through brief
stimulation of his intellect
in servitude through early
ill-usage etch involute
inhibitions
upon his sensibility

sharpened and blunted he
—bound for his unformulate
conception of life⁠—
makes for the harbour

and the dogged officer of Destiny
kept Exodus
and that which he begat
moving along

The highest paid tailor’s
cutter in the “City”
Exodus Lord Israel
nicknamed from his consummate bearing
his coaly eye
challenging the unrevealed universe
speaking fluently “business-English”
to the sartorial world
jibbering stock exchange quotations
and conundrums of finance
to which unlettered immigrants are instantly
initiate
Those foreigners
before whom the soul
of the new Motherland
stands nakedly incognito
in so many ciphers

In the boarding-house the lady with
the locket “You will excuse me⁠— —
Our Dear Queen picks chicken bones in
her fingers” Exodus at leisure
painting knowing not why
sunflowers turned sunwards

Sundays when
England closed the eyes of every
commercial enterprise
but the church and spewed
her silent servants out of her areas
in their bi-weekly “best” to
“Ow get along with you” their lurching lovers
along the rails of parks
The high-striped soldiers of the swagger-stick
tempting the wilder flowers of womanhood
to lick-be-quick ice cream
outside the barracks

This jovian hebrew “all dressed up
and nowhere to go”
stands like a larch
upon the corners of incarcerate streets
deploring the anomalous legs
of Zion’s sons
with the subconscious
irritant of superiority
left in an aristocacy out of currency

paces
the cancellated desert of the metropolis
with the instinctive urge of loneliness
to get to “the heart of something”
The heart of England
sporting its oak
on the rude ratepayer
Hymns ancient and modern
belabour crippled cottage-grands
in parlour fronts
A thrush
shatters its song upon the spurious shade
of a barred bird-fancier’s
The dumb philosophies
of the wondering jew
fall into rhythm with
long unlistened-to hebrew chants
A wave
“out of tide” with the surrounding
ocean he breaks
insensitized non-participance upon himself

(The) unperceived
conqueror of a new world
in terms of cutting and drafting
Exodus lifts his head
over the alien crowds
under the alien clouds
proudly as memory
evokes the panic-stricken
discoverer of his own heart coming
barefoot to the Synagogue
erected by his grandfather — — —
The Rabbi said “Your grandfather
was a great and a just man
we reap what he has sown
— honoured be his memory so here’s
your fare third class
May the God of Israel
bless thee among the Gentiles”

And the God of the Gentiles
blessed him among Israel
he had several
shares in the South Eastern
Railway and other
securities Suddenly

he remembers how his mother
told him he was a seven month’s child
—thing of etherial circulation⁠—
wrapped in wadding somewhat
green-seeming as an untimely apple
And Exodus feels cold
with sympathy for that cold thing
that was himself — — —
The London dusk
wraps up the aborted entity
heeding Solomon’s admonishing spends
circumcised circumspect
his evenings doing lightning calculations
for his high pleasure Painting — — —
feeling his pulse — — —

Incorporeal express trains
from opposite directions
of unequal lengths and velocities
flash through his abstract eye
determines instantly the time
to a decimal fraction of a second
they take to pass each other

Under his ivory hands
his sunflowers sunwards
glow confuse with itinerant
Judaic eyes peering
through narrow-slim entrance-arches
The terrestrial trees shades
virgin bosoms and blossoms
in course of his acclimatization
a hedge-rose — — — —

He paints
He feels his pulse

The spiritual tentacles of vanity
that each puts out towards the culture
of his epoch knowing not how to find
and finding not contact he has repealed
to fumble among his guts

The only
personal reality
he brought from Hungary he takes
to Harley street where medicine
sits the only social science applied to the outsider

The parasite attaches to the English Rose
— — — — — at a guinea a visit
— becomes more tangible to himself the exile
mechanism he learns is built
to the same osseous structure shares
identical phenomena with those
populating the Island
that segregated
from his apprehension moves
a universe of unceasing
energies for the biological
explorer’s introspection

His body
becomes the target of his speculation

His brain ravenous for informative food
spins cobwebs on the only available
branching out of facts
clings to the visceral
items he has heard mentioned
until they ache
under mesmeric concentration
Exodus discovers his nerves
as once Mankind
in pathological mysticism believed
itself to have discovered
its soul
David’s daughter’s doweries
and olive-eyes
virgins capitalized
to tantalize!

Jehovah’s tailor

sets up in business for himself
however
Some queer
marital independence on the English air
keeping him bachelor

While through
stock quotations
and Latin prescriptions
for physic
filters the lyric
aroma of the rose

Exodus knows
no longer father
or brother
or the God of the Jews,
it is his to choose
finance or
romance of the rose

English Rose

Early English everlasting
quadrate Rose
paradox⁠—Imperial
trimmed with some travestied flesh
tinted with bloodless duties dewed
with Lipton’s teas
and grimed with crack-packed
herd-housing
petalling
the prim gilt
penetralia
of a lustre scioned
core-crown;

Rose of arrested impulses
self pruned
of the primordial attributes
— A tepid heart inhibiting
with tactful terrorism
the (Blossom) Populous
to mystic incest with its ancestry
establishing
by the divine right of self assertion
the post-conceptual
virginity of Nature
Wiping
its pink paralysis
across the dawn of reason
A World-blush
glowing from
a never-setting-sun

Conservative Rose
storage
of British Empire-made pot-pourri
of dry dead men making a sweetened smell
among a shrivelled collectivity

Which august dust
stirred by
the trouser-striped prongs of statesmanship
(whenever politic)
rises upon the puff of press alarm
and whirling itself
deliriously around the unseen
Bolshevik subsides
in ashy circularity
“a wreath” upon the unknown
soldier’s grave

And Jehovah strikes,
through the fetish
of the island hedges,
Exodus
who on his holiday
(induced
by the insiduous pink
of Albion’s ideal)
is looking for a rose

And the rose
rises
from the green
of a green lane
rosily-stubborn
and robustly round
— — — — —
Under a pink print
sunbonnet
the village maid
scowls at the heathen

Albion
in female form
salutes the alien Exodus

staring so hard⁠—
warms his nostalgia
on her belligerent innocence

— — The maidenhead
drooping her lid
and pouting of her breast

— — forewarns
his amity
— — — — —
Amorphous meeting
in the month of May
— — — — —

This Hebrew
culled by Cupid on a thorn
of the rose
lays siege
to the thick hedgerows
where she blows
on Christian Sundays
She
simpering in her
ideological pink
He
loaded with Mosaic
passions that amass
like money

implores her to take pity
upon him
and come and be a “lady in the City”

Maiden emotions
bread
on leaves of novels
where anatomical man
has no notion
of offering other than the bended knee
to femininity

and purity
passes in pleasant ways
as the cows graze⁠—

For in those days
when Exodus courted the rose
literature was supposed to elevate us

So the maid with puffy
bosom where Jerusalem
dreams to ease
his head of calculations
in the Zero of ecstasy
and a little huffy
bristles with chastity

For this is the last Judgment
when Jehovah
roars “Open your mouth!
and I will tell you what you have been reading”

Exodus had been reading
Proverbs
making sharp distinction
between the harlot
and the Hausfrau arraying
her offspring in scarlet
approving
such as garner good advice like grain
and such as know enough
to come in from the rain — —

The would-be
secessionist from Israel’s etiquette
(shielding pliant Jewesses from shame
less glances
And the giving
of just percentages
to matrimonial intermediaries)
is spiritually intrigued
by the Anglo-Saxon phenomenon
of Virginity
delightfully
on its own defensive!
This pouting
pearl beyond price
flouting
the male pretentions
to its impervious surface

Alice the gentile
Exodus the jew
after a few
feverish tiffs
and reparations
chiefly conveyed in exclamations
— — a means of expression
modified by lack of experience
unite their variance
in marriage

Exodus
Oriental
mad to melt
with something softer than himself
clasps with soothing pledges
his wild rose of the hedges

While she
expecting
the presented knee
of chivalry
repells
the sub-umbilical mystery
of his husbandry
— hysterically

His passionate anticipation
of warming in his arms
his rose to a maturer colouration
which was all of aspiration
the grating upon civilization
of his sensitive organism
had left him

splinters upon an adamite
opposition
of nerves like stalactites

This dying chastity
had rendered up no soul — — —
Yet they pursued their congugal
dilemmas as is usual
with people
who know not what they do
but know that what they do
— — is not illegal

Deep in the nevrose
night he
peruses this body
divested of its upholstery
firmly insensitive
in mimicry
of its hypothetical model
a petal
of the English rose

An abstracted Ada
in myopic contemplation
of the incontemplatable
compound rosette
of peerless negations

That like other Gods
has never appeared
leaving itself to be inferred
Whereof
it is not seemly
that the one petal
shall apprehend
of the other petals
their conformity

For of this Rose
— wherever it blows
it is certain
that an impenetrable pink curtain
hangs between it and itself
And in metaphysical vagrance
it passes beyond the ken
of men
unless
possessed
of exorbitant incomes
And Then⁠—
merely indicating its presence
by an exotic fragrance

A rose
—that like religions
before
becoming amateur⁠—
enwraps itself
in esoteric
and exoteric
dimensions
the official
and inofficial
social morale
The outer
classes
accepting the official
of the inner — — —
as a plausible
gymnastic
for disciplining the inofficial
“flesh and the devil”
to the ap parent impecca bility
of the Eng — — —
— — — and for
Empire
what form could be superior
to the super-imposed
slivers
of the rose?

The best
is this compressed
all round-and-about⁠—
itself conformation
Never letting out
subliminal infection
from hiatuses
in its sub-roseal skeleton

Its petals hung
with tongues
that under the supervision
of the Board of Education
may never sing in concert — —
for some
singing h
flat and some
h sharp “The Arch
angels sing H”

There reigns a disproportionate
dis’armony
in the English Hanthem
And for further information
re the Rose⁠—
and what it does to the nose
while smelling it
— — See Punch

Mongrel Rose

Ada Gives Birth to Ova

Her face
screwed to the mimic-salacious
grotesquerie of a pain
larger than her intellect
— — — — They pull
A clotty bulk of bifurcate fat
out of her loins
to lie
for a period while performing hands
pour lactoid liquids through
and then mop up beneath it
their golden residue

A breathing baby
mystero-chemico Nemesis
of obscure attractions
(The incontinent
exudes into involuntary
retention
Uncouth conception of the incalculable)

The isolate consciousness
projected from back of time and space
pacing its padded cell

The soul
apprenticed to the butcher business
offers organic wares
to sensibility
A dim inheritor
of this undeniable flesh

The destinies
Genii
of traditional
Israel and of Albion
push on its ominous pillow
its racial birth-rights

(Curses for baby
from its godmothers)
— — — — —
Till the least godmother
pipes — — — in her fairy way
“Perhaps you know my name
— — Survival?
Curse till the cows come home
Behold my gift
The Jewish brain!”

So is the mystic absolute
the rose
that grows
from the red flowing
from the flank of Christ
thorned with the computations
of the old
Jehovah’s gender
Where Jesus of Nazareth
becomes one-piece
with Judas Iscariot
in this composite
Anglo-Israelite

Out of a fatted frown
this spirit pokes its eyes
its star tipped handy-pandies
darting on the air

Solemn and unsurprised
and clumsily
lapped by insensitive maternity
it lies
waving its brand new feet
and feeds
its mongrel heart on Benger’s food
for infants

Enter Esau Penfold

I

Feeling his need for such a book as this
I wrote the “Infant Aesthete” for
my little Esau
— — — — —
Patricia Penfold’s preface Fresh
from the publishers
the “author’s
copy” circulating at the small
and informal reception
for wiseacres and waisted-women
“To view” Esau and his authoress
in their accurate draperies for Lady Bliss
’s classical costume ball

The boy one bare arm
thrust through a gossamer
toga of Tyrian rose
is holding out an orb

—There is a portrait of him in that pose
labelled “Esau holding an orb”

The guests spreading their gleaming
faces forward to convey
that they
remember nothing since the Garden of Eden
the garish innocence
of adult guilt
in the presence of children

One takes the little Esau on his knee
to listen to his watch
and absentmindedly
discourses on the differential calculus
while an African explorer
explains how easily
he might catch lions if he wished
“It only needs kindness and a turn of the wrist”

The matrons
shaking their bustles
with a slight impatience
that one so singled out as he
by British culture
might gain competitively
on their own offspring
decide to “put themselves”
upon the order list
for “Infant Aesthetes”

The fire flicks from the
fifteenth-century
andirons and the ruby eyes
of Buddha
On treasures of Tibet
the “trousered” draperies
of a wood faced Virgin from the Netherlands

The golden wings
of Florentine angels
and a piece of Ming

“Everything” as the five year old Esau
suavely smiles
to a professor of anthropology
“to delight the heart of a child”
In the Penfold residence
on Ridover Square

II

In Kilburn terrace
if you know where that is? — —

Exodus’ child
is propped upon a chair
of chestnut cretonne
printed with maroon
acanthus leaves and big buff water-lillies

and told to “hush”
while thrust
into her baby-pelisse
of ruby plush

under an oleograph
of “The Cat’s Fancy Ball” — —
hung on a sky-blue wall

Ova Begins to Take Notice

A faggot of instincts
that within the year
rises
the caryatid of an idea
Two elongations of its will
arm⁠—crave
the curious glare
virile
behind unravelable wire

The staring baby
stumbles to the fire

Her consciousness
sluggish to raucous surfaces
of necessities

quickens
to colour⁠—thrusts
of the quintessent light

—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠until a woman’s
ineludable claws of dominion
lift her above the Elysian
fields of flame

in a receding
prison
of muscular authority

an agency
for displacing
the finer aspects of the objective
in her sight

and turning to shame
the nucleus
—⁠ ⁠in infantile impotence⁠ ⁠—
of Primeval Right

The suctional soul
clings to the vari⁠—pinct universe

With its reverse
of increate shadow
into which all
elating shows
recede or roll

A crimson ball
bouncing
to her spontaneous psalms
of happiness
rolls
into non⁠ ⁠—⁠ being
under the aera⁠ ⁠—⁠ ivy’s
diaper of rain⁠ ⁠—⁠ pocked dust

She must
make her a rose
out of red thread
but red
ness is inadequate
to the becoming of a rose
— The⁠ —⁠ red⁠ —⁠ reel⁠ —⁠ rolls⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

The prismatic sun⁠ ⁠—⁠ show
of father’s physic bottles
pierced by the light of day
extinguishes!
as she is carried away

Her entity
she projects
into these sudden colours
for self identification

is lost in recurrent annihilation
with an old desperate unsurprise

Her emotions rise
from no beginning
They are worn
with racial patience

So she is patient
with the temperate under⁠ ⁠—
tones of hostile bodies
that stand still
and those
that move
in fretful thunder⁠ ⁠—

—⁠ functions of their
irate Importances
become defined⁠ ⁠—

Nurse’s
draperies are resigned

The mother
draws near unnaturally
as if to assert her dignity
after some
outrage
that seems to rustle
among her draperies
drawn across her thighs
to bunch over her bustle

Jostled
between revolving
armoured towers
carrying
high up on the top
two little spy holes
eyeing⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
and arms like signals
flapping and cuffing

the heavy upholstered
stuffing
of these
two women’s netherbodies

The child
whose wordless
thoughts
grow like visionary plants

finds
nothing objective new
and only words
mysterious

Sometimes a new word comes to her
she looks before her
and watches
for its materialization

“Iarrhea”

Two years of her initiation
to light and darkness⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
and another
baby lies
in the young mother’s
arms of indignation

And it is carefully attended to
but all this passing to⁠ ⁠—
and⁠—fro of hands
does not weave
brightness about the baby
hands that use
the same things too often
and nothing bright
comes of their use

Over the new⁠—born
in the bassinet
the armoured towers
are bending
in iron busks
of curved corsets
consulting⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

And in her ear
a half inaudible⁠—an
iridescent hush
forms “iarrhea”

“It is
quite green” She hears

The cerebral
mush convolving in her skull
an obsessional
colour⁠—fetish

veers
to the souvenir
of the delirious ball
deleted
in the ivied
dust

lets fall
an optic⁠—ray
upon the cat’s⁠—eyes horse⁠—shoe
pinned to a bended bust

And instantly
this fragmentary
simultaneity
of ideas

embodies
the word

A
lucent
iris
shifts
its
irradiate
interstice

glooms and relumes
on an orb of verdigris

An unreal
globe terrestial
of olive⁠—jewel
dilates⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

—⁠ ⁠—⁠ evaporates
into the Increate

And as it vanishes
she crawls into the macabre
shadowiness
upon the floor
under the white valances
of the furnitures
to look for it

She is pulled out by her leg

Opposed Aesthetics

As the arrested artists
of the masses
whose child faces
turned upon Beauty
the puny light
of their immobile recognition

made moon⁠—flowers out of muck
and things desired
out of their tenuous soul⁠—stuff

Until the Ruling Bluff
demanded a hell⁠—full
of labour
for half a belly⁠—full

So did the mongrel⁠—girl
of Noman’s land
coerce the shy
Spirit of Beauty
from excrements and physic⁠—

While Esau of Ridover Square
absorbs the erudite idea
that Beauty is nowhere
except posthumously to itself
in the antique

And trains
the common manifestations
of creation
to flatten
before his eyes
to one vast monopattern

Marriage Boxes

Oh God
That men and women
having undertaken to vanquish one another
should be allowed
to shut themselves up in hot boxes and breed

Spirits of prey
ceaselessly
on the watch in their cruel privacy

Seizing upon occasion
for crippling the personal

to test the law of the craftiest for survival

with that innate will to emerge victorious
present in every human enterprise

until at last the vanquished mate dies
of modification

The days
of the Penfolds and the Exodi
in their respective roles
drip into years

with that perilous
multiplication of petty shocks
so much advertised
against
by the American manufacturers
of india⁠—rubber soles

To the Penfolds
Culture has thrown
its bone
of contention
for the passions to chew on
—so that they shall not howl and bite⁠—

Each one is in the right
according to a different school of accepted philosophy
and eventually
they subside into the pre⁠—polemical silence
of creation

Under the virginia creeper
creeping over
the Exodus’
home
the shocks of intimate impact
of the instinctive
murderer and pamperer
of Jesus
rattle its sockets

Exodus has nothing but his pockets
to impress
his rabid rose of the hedges
while for her redress
she can flaunt the whole of England in his foreign face

It would please us
to look upon this face of Exodus
for it is exceeding beautiful
but this means nothing to the undutiful
woman she being exceeding⁠—
ly short sighted
All forms are the same nought to her
only she had gathered from her literature
that men ought to be fair

and as all women
who have not got the world to choose from
marry in an hallucinatory
conviction
that the best man they can get
will yet
redye his soul in the matrimonial
vats of constant suasion
to the requisite tint⁠—

She suffered a savage irritation
that this jew
should not invest himself automatically
with her prejudices of a superior
insulation
at the merest hint⁠—

Psychic Larva

The head
of the child of Exodus
—reaches
to the level of an abdominal
moroseness

—The moronic womb
from which
we gather our involuntary flesh
hovers
antagonistically
over the child at mother’s knee
And erodes her
with psychic-larva

from an eruptional impotence
of offense⁠—
—rolling upon her

To the mother
the blood⁠—relationship
is a terrific indictment of the flesh

under cover
of clothing and furnishing
“somebody” has sinned
and their sin
—a living witness of the flesh
swarms with inquisitive eyes

resenting
the lasting
presence of a vile origin
There is no liberation
from this inversion
of instinct
making subliminal depredations
on Ova’s brain

She is overshadowed
by the mother’s aura
of sub⁠—carnal anger
restringent to the pores
of her skin⁠—
which opening
like leaves for rain
crave for caressings
soft as wings

Lacking dictionaries
of inner consciousness⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
unmentionable stigmata
is stamped
by the parent’s solar⁠—plexus
in disequilibrium
on the offspring’s
intuition

Christ’s Regrettable Reticence

Ova is at the mercy
of the enigmatical behaviour
around her

only One behaves
unlike all others
the gentle Jesus

whose unseen behaviour
like a mouse or a fairy

in lurking discretion
is the wary
perfection
of a shy saviour

“Oh why wouldn’t the Gentle
come out
—into the open
and just show them?”

Yet she loves the Gentle

“Perhaps if he knew there
was a dear little girl here
who wouldn’t hurt him
—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—if he came out?”

For a pale
pitiful housemaid
who bowed
healingly
between
her and the loud
maternity⁠—

Has told her
of⁠—Gentle Jesus
our excuse⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—
He dipped his hand in the sauce⁠—tureen
and allowed his disciples to do the same

And that for every infantile
indiscretion
there is absolution
in Christ’s name

And she
is credulous
as all hungry
imaginations in Man
swallow the parsimonious
presentations put before them

Enter Colossus

About this time
in an Alpine
summer resort The male fruit
of a Celtic couple
is baptized
Colossus

And the first time
that ever he sits up
devouring his pap
It is as if a pillar of iron
erects him
in place of a spine

And the first time
he opens his eyes
wittingly⁠—
’Tis like an eagle
soaring on the sun
and the first time
he communes within himself
he decides
All words are lies

His gracious little lady⁠—bird
of a mamma
dresses him in velvet suits
of gentian blue
determined she will do
her best to keep him
a little gentleman
like his ancestors
even
if he does not live in
London

Her idea of rearing a son
is showing him to everyone
in the drawing⁠—room
for them to praise him

which idea is rather distorted
by the little one
throwing the tea⁠—pot
at Mme Follilot
because her top-knot
displeases him so

And who
would care to call at
any house on finding the young master in the hall
pissing into our reverend pastor’s hat?

He like so many of us
has his own sense of fun
and when his governess offers him a bun
“Bring me a bifsteek de femme
— — and under done!”

These women run
in all directions
when he appears
This palpable
evidence of his mother’s
unfortunately
having given birth to a criminal
— — — —
Postures of a monster
coincident
with the Christian
introspection
of Ova

Ova. Among. The. Neighbours.

(The drama of)
a human consciousness
(played to the inattentive audience
of the Infinite)
gyrates
on the ego⁠—axis
intoxicates
with the cosmic
proposition of being it — —

Till the inconsiderate
competitional brunt
of its similars
informs it
of several millions
“pulling the same stunt”

this consciousness within her
uncurled itself upon the rollers of objective experience
printing impressions
vaguely and variedly
upon Ova
In place of the more formulate education
coming naturally
to the units of a national instigation
— — — — —
New Life
when it inserts itself into continuity
is disciplined
by the family
reflection
of national construction
to a proportionate posture
in the civilized scheme

deriving
definite contours
from tradition

personality
being mostly
a microcosmic
replica
of institutions

Indigenous neighbours
before their hearths
pile up their Gods
—sightless and mindless⁠—
but still the Gods
of an indigenous clay

Something dumb
but doubtless
is being accomplished
by the quotidian inspiration
towards frustration
of all
other clays
of Earth’s conception
And to each

inhabitant of the crudest streets
is allotted the pride
of controlling the tide
of seas that he has never set eyes upon
but hears
are his

Suburban children
of middle⁠—class Britain
ejected from the home

are still connected
with the inseverable
navel⁠—cord of the mother⁠—land
and
need never feel alone

And if this tepid flesh
of uni⁠—conscious islanders
feels no particular passion
towards its propagations
it knows
that each is integral
to that removed yet irremovable
rose
and rejoices in them only symbolically

for if one should not defer
his opinions to his flower
of utter chivalry
he is cut off utterly

“Except ye become as a little child”
the lord was heard when upon earth
to say⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ —it is inferred⁠—
that he preferred⁠—
an Idiot child from birth

There is no other clime
where nurseries bloom
so luxuriantly so “over time”
as in England

where ardently⁠—
adults
—anxiously
concoct a lunacy
of flippant fallacy
for innocence

And the meticulous
punctualities
of fresh air and milk
mix
with the coloured imbecilities
exalted⁠—
illustrated⁠—
for children’s libraries

O may the hot⁠—house purity⁠—
essence
of English childhood⁠—
prolong itself
into autumnal adolescence⁠ ⁠—

O may the fuddled blue
of the imperial eye
forget⁠—me⁠—not⁠—itself
in distinct conceptions
of functional existence

O may it muddle through
bright with its bland taboo
from the nursery to the cemetery
Amen

Ova Has Governesses

Ova knows none of these
pretty artifices
of happy nurseries
for foisting illusive sops
on the untamable brute
called Life

For her
the irredeemable anaemia
of hour upon hour
devoid
of invitation to vitality
drifts through her arteries

Changed to her Mother’s vagaries
her Nurses and governesses
pinch⁠—faced conservatives
respect Life
they let it alone
lest it discomfort them
before the awful comfort of the grave
save them

They have none of the
elite audacity
to tease its slumberous ferocity
with a felicitous humour
that sets
it at defiance
They never accompany
its growls with clarinettes

She is laid
in London’s under⁠—lap
of unutterable lapidary
—persistance
of pavements into distance

The grey air
stricken with trees
whose vernal hair
is spoiled with soot

The flux of Life she
flows on
of gruesome
inner and outer architecture
and dingy damask

A twilit turbulence
of routine in coma
shot
with stranded rockets
of curative colour

The ghoulish clouds
hide God
who should
have made the world
a musical⁠—box
of coloured glass
growing like gilly⁠—flowers
and Phlox⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—⁠ ⁠—

with butterfly⁠—winged
cherubim
warbling in
low⁠—branched fruit trees

Jews and Ragamuffins of Kilburn

But she goes
shopping in —kill⁠—burn⁠— —
she knows
it⁠—named for its pavement lid of hell⁠—⁠ ⁠—

here dwell
haberdashers
they scare her
with adventures
of dashing rabbit⁠—hares

Gingerly Nurse
lifts her nose
because
in Kilburn are so many Jews

She fears to find them crawling up her socks
but hears
the Jews killed Jesus
and are bound for Hades
with r⁠—⁠o⁠—⁠u⁠—⁠n⁠—⁠d noses

Here where the common children swarm
—who choose
chillblains and chaps
and fluted shoes
and shout “Gaa⁠—⁠aar⁠—⁠rn”

One
wearing
a straggling lambs’⁠—wool tippet
tied in front
with a tag of pink tape
and at the back
her plait
humps itself over it

kneels
in a queer
position
of sideway struggle
Her leg has slipped
between the spear
headed palings growing
a trap
on the crude depth
of an empty area
. . . . . . . . . . . . .
Ova fears
—⁠ —That she can never
release it
iron is so hard
that even the strongest man in the world
could
never bend it

Ova bears⁠—
horror for this child
caught in a novel hell
of immovable metal
which is eternal

“Hold up your chin”
nurse says “you begin

to walk like a horrid ragamuffin”
The common children
have the best of her
—though dressed in
rags⁠—They feed on muffin

The Surprise

The things the armoured towers
tell
are not quite real
The things they do
never “happen”

only their actions
convince on those occasions
when they blow up
and scatter her reason

Sometimes
a level shaft of sweetness
cleaves
the irate thunder

Miss Bunn
whose face of a china doll
has taken on a
significance
of foolish intelligence
that children love so well

who performs
the duties of a clown
and whose door⁠—bell
is so low down

often invited to come
cajoles
chaos to laughter
seldom heard in this home
and only
in company
as a disguise for thunder

“If you be good girl or boy
as I suppose you be
you will neither laugh nor smile
at the tickling of your knee”

She brings
a surprise basket
full
of Japanese fishes of cotton wool

“We will not tell Miss Bunn”
says father “what we have done
peeping in the basket”

In the evening
the armoured towers are sitting
round the surprise
—They look as if they will not be sitting there long⁠—
They ask it⁠—
“Have you peeped in the basket?”

Ova looking
partakingly at the father
anxious not to do wrong
“No”
“Ho” Snaps the father
“you opened that surprise
under my eyes”

Jumping out of chairs
“Liar”
makes a lot of noise

She is turned into a liar
by father
They push her
out of the front door with their hands

Her head expands
There is nothing
she knows how to expect from these big bodies
who hustle her through demeaning duties
in humiliation
and without animation

A coolness rising
from the rainy gravel
damp⁠—smelling friendliness of the dark
allays her sudden fever
She has left behind her forever
Liar whatever
it is
and Japanese fishes

She decides to travel

A hand upon her shoulder
jolts her
with mocking laughter
bolts her
to smoulder
once more
behind the door

Illumination

Ova is standing
alone in the garden

The high⁠—skies
have come gently upon her
and all their
steadfast light is shining out of her

She is conscious
not through her body but through space

This saint’s⁠—prize
this indissoluble bliss
to be carried like a forgetfullness
into the long nightmare

Contraction

She is contracting
to the enveloping
plasm of uneasiness
in which she is involved with the big bodies

The garden
the child’s
first place of purity
is become defiled

an egg is smashed
a horrible
aborted contour
a yellow murder
in a viscous pool

She knows not Time yet
it lies there
for a thousand years
of return to puzzle
over a defrauded race of chickens
pecking the gravel in unconcern

The Gift

Somewhat above the level
of the entrailed anger
of the mother
the pockets of the Father
invisible⁠—
depth
—interminable
from whence spring riches
and a sullen
economic war

houses and food and fire
proceed from them
and over them
he crows continually

Proximity
to Ova’s skulled mentality
of money which magically
is life

He tells her
he is a good Father
his child must obey him
should he choose to do so
he can bestow
upon her whatever she pray him

Heseems a sovereign
the maximum
of money
A golden octopus
grasping
She is asking
for a sovereign
to buy a circus universe

Laughing
he gives her a shining coin

She is exalted
in spontaneous knowledge of beauty

She confronts the solution of her destiny
and sudden the potentiality
of achievement
through her august parent

“I will buy ‘all this’ my sovereign
The flower seller
is bewildered⁠—

Nurse distrusts

She thrusts
out the open nacreous palm of her hand
that they may understand

“Ga‑aarn —you little fool
who’re you a gittin at?
That’s
a new farthing!”

She comes
to a curb⁠—stone
a woman is sitting upon
beyond
a rampant radiance
Of April jonquil
Gala yellow

Fa⁠—how evil a Father must be
to burst a universe by getting
so fa⁠—r into a sovereign

Ova Accepts the Popular Estimate of Humanity

Press the cerebellum
into phantom
moulds of idealism

and no matter
what ocular
and intellectual contact with phenomena
occur⁠—
Grey matter
is addled forever

Ova accepts Christ
as the sacrificial
prototype
of the laboriously elect
sect

notwithstanding
that the maternal christian
is inflicting

Him upon her
as a spiritual bludgeon
threatening⁠—

And the vaguely disgusting
inquietudes of the flesh surrounding
her she also accepts
as she is bidden
as hidden
immortalities
that ripen
for divine destinies

Religious Instruction

In mixed marriages
it is mostly the custom
for female children
to adhere to the maternal religion

While the Father presides over
the mystical prattle with ironical
commentary from his arm⁠—chair

But by whichever
religious route
to brute
reality
our forebears speed us

(Perfection
being an obligation
shoved on to
the next generation)

There is always a pair
of idle adult
accomplices in duplicity
to impose upon their brood
ideals
erected upon such increate altitudes
that Man
in falling from contemplation
of a more simulacrum
has soused himself (in blood
since Time began)

Jehovah
—exemplar par excellence
of megalomania⁠—
the Whole Old Testament
of butcherly chastisement
to coerce humanity
to an “assumed acceptance”
of an abstract idea

And that Christ
came with his light
of toilless lilies
to say “Fear
not it is I”

And bowed the ocean tossed
—with a poet’s feet
which being dead
are suspended over⁠—head
neat⁠—
ly crossed
in anguish
and wounded with red
varnish

From these
slow⁠—drying bloods of mysticism
mysteriously
the something⁠—soul emerges
miserably

an instinct (of economy)
in every race
for reconstructing debris
has planted a face
in outer darkness

The lonely peering eye
of humanity
looked into the Néant
— —and turned away

X

Ova’s consciousness
impulsive to commit itself to justice
—to arise and walk
its innate straight way
out of the
accidence of circumstance

collects the levitate chattels
of its will
and makes for the
magnetic horizon of liberty
with the soul’s foreverlasting
opposition
to disintegration

So this child of Exodus
with her heritage of emigration
often
“sets out to seek her fortune”
in her turn
trusting to terms of literature
dodging the breeders’ determination
not to return “entities sent on consignment”
by their maker Nature
except in a condition
of moral
effacement

Lest Paul and Peter
never
notice the creatures
ever had had Fathers
and Mothers

They were disgraced in their duty
should such spirits
take an express passage
through the family bodies
to arrive at Eternity
as lovely as they originally
promised

So on whatever day
she chooses “to run away”
the very
street corners of Kilburn
close in upon Ova
to deliver her
into the hands of her procreators

Oracle of civilization
“Thou shalt not live by dreams alone
but by every discomfort
that proceedeth out of
legislation⁠—

The Social Status of Exodus

Out of the hands of God
the aboriginal
muscle-pattern
with its ominously
cruciform completion
in view of propagation
indulged its uniform
imputation
of the image and likeness
of Deity⁠— —
to satiety

and through varying civilizations
experimented in deformations
of contour
while fashion
and fanaticism disputed
with passion
the incompatibility
with his dignity

of exposing man
to the contemplation
of the insignia
of his origin
and continuity

Theological tinkers
and serious thinkers
attacked the problem
of dissubstantiation
— — — — —

Some said
“It were better to cast it off from us utterly”
And some took a plank of wood and set it
about with nails and lay upon it
saying “This will make us forget it”

Spiritual drapers
Popes and fakirs and shakers
decked it
out with oblivion
and let it
appear
to disappear

But to no effect
For men of a happy⁠—go⁠—lucky vulgarity

relegated
this jew⁠—jaw of general invective
to a hole and corner secretive
popularity
And absurd
as it may seem
the “unprintable word”
is impossible to erase from a vocabulary

And there arose another
greater than Jehovah
The Tailor — —
— —the stitches of whose seams
He is unworthy to unloose

Out of the hands of Exodus
the Oxonian
seeming
a sunbeam that has chanced to stray
into a cut⁠—away
(Gentlemen
wear
clothes
with an easy air
of debonair
inevitability)

Clothed and shod
the tailor’s concept of the man made God
(Sartorial peril of the yellow race
looking so out of place)
peoples the sod — —

Under the shears
of the prestidigitator cutter
(who achieves
the unachievable Act of the Apostles)
the cruciform scourge
of conscience
disappears⁠—
in utter
bifurcate dissimulation
leaving
only those inevitable yet more or less circumspect
creasings
in the “latest thing in trouserings”
—or serge
And man
at last assumes his self⁠—respect

And man with his amorphous nature

who defied
the protoform of Who made him
but has not denied
Him
obeyed
the tailor who remade him
and denies him

He is despised
this ostracized
fancier of travestied torsoes
weaver of fig⁠—leaves out of cheviot
who staked the plot
of manhood in his nobler form

The gently born
they turn away

from the tailor
Who knows?
“Man that is born of woman”
Perhaps he chose
an occupation all too feminine
— — — — — —

Neither is this the reason that they give
(Thou shalt not look upon the face of God and live!)

Gertrude Stein

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word

Endnotes

Marriage portions. ↩

Colophon

Poetry
was compiled from poetry published between 1914 and 1924 by
Mina Loy.

This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
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Robin Whittleton,
and is based on transcriptions from
various sources
and on digital scans from
various sources.

The cover page is adapted from
La Danseuse Obsédante,
a painting completed in 1911 by
Gino Severini.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.

This edition was released on
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The first edition of this ebook was released on
February 29, 2024, 8:07 p.m.
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