Chapter III

If you subtract a nose you add religion,
Supine, and in a glitter of explanation
Expanding the unreasonable second
Of chattering, pugnacious flesh.
The inquisitive elevation of noses
Does not fit into the smooth
Curvatures of faith.
If you remove the lips you add
Philosophy, for lips express the warm
Quarrel of emotions and become
Crimson antagonists to contemplation.
If you subtract the eyes you add
The fertile smugness of earth,
For eyes are rapid skeptics
Tossing light beyond the circles of earth.
Flesh will remain and vacillate
Between the cocaine of belief
And times of wakefulness
Designed to replenish the drug.
Then reconstruct the face
With shifting experiments
Of spirit, fantasy, and intellect,
Intent upon violating
The tyrannies of formal reiteration.
Men will revile you and bestow
The necessary background.

DEFINITIONS

Music is a treacherous sound,
Seducing emotions and marking
Their breathless faces with death.
Art is an intrepid mountebank,
Enraging philosophies and creeds
By stepping into the black space beyond them.
Religions are blindly tortured eyes,
Paralyzing the speed of imagination
With static postures of hope.
History is an accidental madness,
Using nations and races
To simulate a cruel sanity.
(In the final dust
This trick will be discovered.)
Psychology is a rubber-stamp
Pressed upon a slippery, dodging ghost,
But thousands of centuries can remove
All marks of this indignity.

Men, each snuggling proudly
Into an inch of plausible falsehood,
Will hate the careless smile
That whitens these definitions.
The table has been broken by fists;
The fanatic has mangled his voice;
The scientist cautiously repairs the room
Beyond which he dares not peer.
Life, they will never cease to explain you.

TO A CORPULENT SINGER

I

Bulging maturity
Constructs an unfair version
Of curves not visible
To eyes upon the outside face.

II

If a soul is more
Slender than the motives of wind,
Flesh provides the necessary
Privacy, and in a rising voice
The soul proclaims its gratefulness.