Chapter I: Front Matter

AGAINST THIS AGE

AGAINST THIS AGE

MAXWELL BODENHEIM

BONI AND LIVERIGHT
PUBLISHERS : : NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
BONI AND LIVERIGHT, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To
FEDYA AND MINNA
FOUR EYES WITHIN A BLIND WORLD

Some of the poems in this book have appeared in _The Century_, _The Bookman_, _The Nation_, _The Dial_, _The Menorah Journal_, _Broom_, _The Double Dealer_, _Shadowland_, and _Harper’s Magazine_.

CONTENTS

BABY 11

NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING DELICATE 13

REGARDING AN AMERICAN VILLAGE 22

THREE PORTRAITS 25

DEFINITIONS 28

TO A CORPULENT SINGER 29

TOPSY-TURVY 30

REVILE THE ACROBAT 32

COMPULSORY TASKS 34

RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH MONEY 36

HIGHLY DELIBERATE POEM 38

POEM 40

REALISTIC CREATOR 41

CITY STREETS 42

DECADENT CRY 43

GIRL 44

COLOR AND A WOMAN 46

RELUCTANT LADY 48

PSYCHOLOGY FROM MARS 49

TO TIME 51

DECADENT DUET 52

POEM TO A POLICEMAN 54

INTIMATE SCENE 56

NEW YORK CITY 58

WE WANT LYRICS 60

A VISITOR FROM MARS SMILES 62

SURPRISE 63

AGAINST THIS AGE

BABY

1

The blue beginning of your eyes
Condenses the sprawling and assured
Blue with which the sky retreats
From those obscene confessions known as days.

2

Again, your battling mites of blue
Try to stop the revolving monster of life
And find the indelible persuasiveness
Of single forms within the circling blur.
Sundered bits of a soul
Astonished at their shrunken estate,
They are not sure that they have still survived,
And plead for the conviction of sight.

3

But when they recollect
The hugely placid manners
Of their life, before the earthly exile
Made them small and fastened
To one pathetic puzzle,
Their blue reverts to swelling reveries
Whose outward circles spurn the curtained jail.

4

Upon your softly incomplete
Face, where germs of devils stir in curves
That tremble into questioning symmetries,
A thrust of darkness sometimes interferes
With secret, virgin places underneath
Your eyes and where your leaf-thin nostrils pause.
This darkness bends with helpless messages,
Like history admonishing a world
Personified in one, composite face.

NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING DELICATE

You mutter, with your face
Pleading for more room because
It has scanned a panorama:
You mutter, with every difference
On your face an error in size
Mesmerized by the sight of a sky-line:
“Life is a nightmare and something delicate.”
Lady, they have made a world for you,
And if you dare to leave it
They will flagellate you
With the bones of dead men’s thoughts,
And five senses, five termagants
Snapping at the uneasy mind.
“No, five riotous flirts,”
You say, “and each one has
A thick blandishment to master the mind.”
Yes, lady, through the bold disarrangement of words
Life acquires with great foresight
An interesting nervousness.
But O lady with a decadent music
Somehow silent in lines of flesh,
Finding your face too small,
Finding the earth too small,
Have they not informed you
That crowding life into seven words
Is an insincere and minor epigram?
And have they not reprimanded you
Because you fail to observe
Their vile and fervent spontaneity,
These howlers of earthly shrouds?
And have they neglected to drive
The bluster of their knuckles against your face
Because you rush from the leg and arm
Anecdotes of microscopical towns,
Bandying with a fantasy
Which they call thin and valueless?
“Life is a nightmare and something delicate,”
You repeat, and then, “O yes, they have done these things
To me because I take not seriously
The interval between two steps
Made by Death, who has grown a little tired.
When Death recovers his vigor
The intervals will become
Shorter and shorter until
No more men are alive.
But now they have their chance.
The wild, foul fight of life
Delights in refreshing phrases--
Swift-pouring tranquillities and ecstasies
Atoning for the groaning stampede
That desecrates the light
Between each dawn and twilight.
And those who stand apart
Use the edged art of their minds
To cut the struggling pack of bodies
Into naked, soiled distinctness.”
Lady, do not let them hear you.
You are too delicate--
Deliberately, nimbly, remotely, strongly
Delicate--and you will remind them
Too much of Death, who is also
The swiftly fantastic compression
Of every adjective and adverb
Marching to nouns that live
Beyond the intentions of men.
Men are not able, lady,
To strike his face, and in vengeance
They will smear your face
With the loose, long hatred of their words.
I will wash your face
With new metaphors and similes,
Telling carefully with my hands
That I love you not for your skin,
And every bird at twilight
Will be enviously astonished
At your face now insubstantial
Indeed, you have an irony
That ironically doubts
Whether its power is supreme,
And at such times you accept
The adequate distraction
Of cold and shifting fantasy.
This is your mood and mine,
And with it we open the window
To look upon the night.
The night, with distinguished coherence,
Is saying yes to the soul
And mending its velvet integrity
Torn by one forlorn
Animal that bounds
From towns and villages.
The night is Blake in combat
With an extraordinary wolf
Whose head can take the mobile
Protection of a smile;
Whose heart contains the ferocious
Lies of ice and fire;
Whose heart with stiff and sinuous
Promises swindles the lips and limbs of men;
Whose heart persuades its confusion
To welcome the martyred certainties
Of cruelty and kindness;
Whose brain is but a calmness
Where the falsehoods of earth
Can fashion masks of ideas.
Welcome the wolf.
Bring lyrics to fondle his hair.
Summon your troops of words
And exalt his gasping contortions.
Lady, it is my fear
That makes me give you these commands.
Men will force upon you
The garland of their spit
If you fail to glorify,
Or eagerly disrobe,
The overbearing motives of their flesh.
And every irony of yours
Will be despised unless
A hand of specious warmth
Directs the twist of your blades.
O lady, you are flashing detachment
Clad in exquisitely careful
Fantasy, and on your face
Pity and irony unite
To form the nimble light of contemplations.
Men will dread you as they fear
Death, the Ultimate Preciosity.
Stay with me within this chamber
And tell me that your heart
Is near to a spiral of pain
Curving perfectly
From the squirming of a world.
See, you have made me luminous
With this news, and my heart,
Fighting to be original,
Ends its struggle in yours.
Turning, we trace a crescent
Of conscious imagination
Upon the darkness of this room.
Night and window still remain.
Night, spiritual acrobat,
Evades with great undulations
The moans and exultations of men.
His madly elastic invitation
To the souls of men
Gathers up the imagination
Of one poet, starving in a room
Where rats and scandals ravish the light.
With conscious combinations of words
The poet bounds through space with Night.
Together they observe
The bleeding, cheated mob
Of bodies robbed by one quick thrill.
Cold, exact, and fanciful,
They drop the new designs of words
Upon a vastly obvious contortion.
Poet and night can see
No difference between
The peasant, groveling and marred,
And smoother men who cringe more secretly.
Yet they give these men
The imaginary distinctions of words.
Compassionate poet and night.
You say: “With glaring details
Attended by the voices of men,
Morning will attack the poet.
Men will brandish adjectives.
Tenuous! Stilted! Artificial!
Dreams of warm permanence
Will grasp the little weapons
Furnished by the servant-mind.
Dreams ... ah, lady, let us leave
The more precise and polished dream
Of our sadness, and surpass
The scoundrel, beggar, fool, and braggart
Fused into a loose convulsion
Called by men amusement.
Laughter is the explosive trouble
Of a soul that shakes the flesh.
Misunderstanding the signal
Men fly to an easy delight.
Causes, obscure and oppressed,
Cleave the flesh and become
Raped by earthly intentions.
Thus the surface rôles of men
Throw themselves upon the stranger,
Changing his cries with theirs.
The aftermath is a smile
Relishing the past occurrence.
Lady, since you desire
To clutch the meaning of this sound and pause,
Laugh and smile with me more sadly
And with that attenuated, cold
Courage never common to men.
Another window is behind us,
Needing much our laugh and smile.