Chapter II

Lady upon whose head
I weave the motives of this poem,
Change your sex to a barely visible
Trembling that can match the fluttering charm
Of the wreath that I have made for you.
When this task is finished
We may saunter gayly
Past the cunning niches
That psychology has made for us.

REVILE THE ACROBAT

Maiden, where are you going,
With impudence that makes your arms and legs
Unnecessary feathers?
Your eyes have interceded
Between the flesh and soul,
And show a light of reconciliation.
For whom have you prepared yourself?

I go to see an acrobat
Reviled by men, and acting
Within a lonely circus owned
By Mind, Soul, & Heart, Incorporated.
I love his limbs whose muscles
Compete with twirls of gossamer,
And Oh, I love him not
With the drooling, fevered weight of earth.
He turns my blood to one
Profusion of melted wings.

Maiden, why is this acrobat
Better than men who stand within
The favored halls of mind and heart,
Playing, with lust and dignity,
Violins and trumpets?

They are not better, and he,
Whose thoughtful quickness combines
The pliantness of mind and soul,
He is not worse--the thoughts of men
Stand still on high roofs of the mind,
Or borrow sorceries of flesh,
While he, with flimsy trails
Of ruffles on a gaudy jacket,
Springs into the air; assaults
Every stately, fierce, robust
Finality that men have made.
He cares not whether he is right or wrong.
He seeks a decorative speed
Of thought and soul, and he is not afraid
Of being insincere.
Men loathe him, but I clothe him
With magnificent, specific
Fabrics slighter than the remorse of a child
And bearing involved births of colors.
Strength is not alone
The size and thickness known to men!

COMPULSORY TASKS

Words, it is apparent
That you are crucified and fondled
By the pride of each new generation.
O words, whose sportive formations
Could make the courts of intellect
Belligerent and insane,
Men have sentenced you
To scores of endless drudgeries.
Weakened by the years,
You guard the dying bonfires
Of each nation and race.
Again, like hordes of cattle,
You drag the expectations
Of social theories and remedies,
Stopping only when the blood of men
Washes away your useless labours.
I have seen your bands
Of ragged courtesans
Marching in feverish lines
To rescue the rites of sex.
I have watched you rush
To repair the cracks
In breaking cathedrals and churches.
With gilded, exclamatory vowels
You garnish the cowering of earth,
And with recurring darkness
You spurn the peering mind.
Again you are hands of intellect,
Disrobing the flesh of men
And carefully preserving
Each discarded garment
With a pinch of powdered emotion.
Again you are driven forth
In lying mobs of sighs and laughs
To warm the evening hours of a nation.
(“They could never restrain themselves
To wait at home for the postman ...
Would Copperfield marry Dora or Agnes?”)
Sentimental breathlessness
Fleeing from the helpless decay of thought.
O words, brow-beaten bricklayers
Obeying the shouts of science
And raising walls upon whose top
The soul is perched, contemptuously
Squinting down at toiling pygmies:
O words, and you can be
Superbly demented skeptics,
Betraying the unctuous failures of earth;
Riding the wild horse of the mind:
Bringing spurs into play;
Summoning with pain the lurking soul.

RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH MONEY

How many planets have you raped,
Where only animals escaped
To scrape with melancholy needs
The bones of last men lost in weeds?
Since you are blunt and fraudulent
You must receive a bare treatment.
Adverbs and adjectives undress
When greeted by excrescences.
You are the stench on any street,
Thick with the vagaries of defeat:
The wench who plies her squawking crime
Within the alley-ways of time.
For men desire to guard with pain
The limitations of their brain,
And drag the numbness of their hearts
Within ornate and creaking carts.
And for these tasks they must be bold,
Clutching endurance from a cold
Squirming with you within the dark,
And rising blistered with your mark.
Again you give to doubting lust
An argument which it can trust.
Imagination spoils the scene
And needs a dagger, crude and mean.
For you were made by men to choke
A lyric with an obscene joke
And strike the mind when it is strong,
With whips methodical and long.
Men who are inarticulate
Desire to parody their fate
With gibberish of clinking coins.
When life, excited thief, purloins
The voice and energy of men,
They lead him to a mouldy pen:
They seek revenge and watch him wilt,
Finding importance in his guilt.
They do not know that they have made
The thief to revel in his aid.
And you are there to strain your cheek
Against imaginations weak--
Coquettish counterfeit of strength.
I have observed your metal length
Of hands drop on the poet’s throat,
And yet he scarcely saw you gloat.
To certain men you merely feed
The stoics of creative need.

_Money_

I am the vicious test with which
Men find that they are poor or rich.
Without my challenge men might fail
To leave the blurred and murderous jail.
Utopias are merely death:
Men need the scorching of my breath.

HIGHLY DELIBERATE POEM

“Mother o’ mi-i-ine, mother o’ mi-i-ine,
Sweet as uh ro-ose in thuh spring-ti-i-ime”--

The man who bawls this song
Has the face of a spell-bound, hairless rat.
Entranced within a spotlight,
He borrows unconsciously
Another voice from despair.
The ordinary squeak of his life
Is paralyzed, and fear of death
Lends him a tenor voice
To supplicate the Catcher.
But the audience fails to understand
And makes flat sounds of glee
With hands ... Death, quietly
Disgusted at this blind approval,
Takes away the spotlight.
Now safe, the rat presents
Jerks of gratitude and scampers off
To gnaw at his wife within their dressing-room.
That squeezed-in bag of piteous
Mythologies described as heart
Has opened in one thousand people
And received a vision
Of past solicitude for other bags.
The rat repeats this feat and wins
Varieties of coarse sweetmeats.
At sixty the rat will be a gorged
Machiavelli, wondering
Whether he has not blundered.
Death finds no interest in killing rats
And often allows them to live,
Preferring instead the less buried souls
Of a poet or a child of ten.
But the rat has found a fear
Within the second eyes of whiskey
And relates it to his wife.
“Say, May, this thing is funny!
You won’t believe me, but tonight
Just before I started the act
I felt like I was gonna die.
What in hell is wrong with me?
This booze must be drivin’ me bughouse.
Well, move a leg, and get that thousand
Faulkner promised you, and stop
Sitting there and staring at me.”
Death, who has listened with fastidious
Ennui, strolls off to slay
A negro infant newly born.

POEM

A curious courtship in your brain
Regulates the movements of your limbs.
Remorse, the fanciful, abandoned
Child of madness, discovers its lips
Upon the breast of a hovering Madonna.
How many poets present
The crushed tips of their hearts
Pieced carefully together as a wreath
Upon the two heads of this wooing?
Imagination is a wound
Upon the adventures of thoughts,
And one scar left behind
Is known as reality.
Will they give you robes
Threaded with orderly shimmers of repentance,
Pardoning the scar in earthly ways?

REALISTIC CREATOR

_A Sonnet Dedicated to T. S. Eliot_

An intimate and playful accident
Common to life had placed him on a bench
Beside an old and stiffly wounded wench.
With erudite and careful eyes he sent
A sneer to tear away her feeble mask
And snatch the battered dullness of her heart.
He spied her only in the scheming part
Of soiled flesh bickering with some trivial task.

The lacerated madness of her soul,
And delicate emotions kicked by life,
Did not invade the swift tricks of his mind.
Regarding her, he could not see the whole,
Or catch the psychic lunge behind her strife.
His eyes were savagely adroit, and blind.

CITY STREETS

This pavement and the sordid boast of stone
And brick that wins the pity of a sky
Are only martyred symbols made to buy
A dream of permanence for flesh and bone.
The jumbled, furtive anecdotes of lips
And limbs that bring their fever to this street,
They will subside to fragments of defeat
Within the cool republic where death trips.

This is an age where flesh desires to shape
Intense hyperboles in prose and verse,
Transforming city streets and country lanes
To backgrounds aiding physical escape.
But city streets are waiting to disperse
With ruins the fight and plight of earthly pains.

DECADENT CRY[A]

Hill-flowers salute his feet
Upon the upward slant of a path.
His destination does not matter.
His legs divide the spacious tragedy
Of distance into the small translation
Of steps, and with their aid he reaches
The fraudulent temple of a pause or end.
Hill-flowers, important and unprejudiced,
Bow to this monster-clown.
His feet, ridiculous and neat,
Do not stop, for they must ape
A certainty and hasten to attack
Or praise fixed idols made by flesh and mind.
Hill-flowers, trimly polished
Devices hailing preciosity;
Rumpled by the wind
To scores of original caprices;
Bearing the transfigured skirmish
Of spiritual moods that men call color;
Swiftly and unassumingly
Deaf to lusts and traditions--
They are not regarded
By the men who walk, flat-footed,
Or with scholarly exactitude,
In chase of an ardent chicanery
Known as flesh, and elderly
Quibbles of mind and emotion.

Only an intellect clad in sprightly chiffon
Can spy the importance of flowers on a hill.

[A] _Dedicated to a rare moment of intelligence on the part of The
Dial._

GIRL

The words of men are not conjectures
Lunging toward your soul:
They do not wish you to leave
The fawning thefts of flesh.
When with covered formality
They tramp from actual pulpits,
They merely bring celestial nonsense
For one, uncurious, sanctified bed.
Ah, girl, the soul that they give you
Is a clumsy, white
Concert-master rebuking
The first-violin of your body.
Again they brand a word,
Sacredness, upon your breast,
Claiming that your soul is tied
To the pliant riot of your limbs.

Girl, I can forget for a moment
That hairs upon the bulge of my chest
Must be praised or censured,
And I have no desire
To belittle you with one,
Hopeless, cynical, sententious
Group of words, while intellect,
Flavoring its tea-cup with a sneer,
Watches you from shaded balconies.
When you win the torpid illness
Known as virtue you are less important
Than a quest for daisies in the moon,
And when you merely ask
For one blow and inertness,
An old dream yells and ends
With the quietness of sprawling pity.
Girl, avoid the plentiful
Drugs of seriousness and spend
Pieces of your heart on every whim.
Give your flesh the light and sharp
Contacts of a thistle blown
Across the wincing cheeks of rogues.
Make your soul and body spurn
Each other with a swift impertinence,
And let your clawing griefs and joys
Be still a moment on the couch of thought.
And if at times you turn your head
To spy the hatred of philosophers
And panting realists, preserve the smile
Of one who takes a suitable reward.

COLOR AND A WOMAN

Cry the names of colors
And fail to reproduce
The brightly worried way
In which they burn ideas,
Sweeping hues of intangible blood
Into the conspiring fires of soul:
The darkly reticent manner
With which they embalm emotions,
Ending the spontaneous treachery
With a self-possessed attraction.
Chant the names of colors
And fascinate the brown
Coward, who surrounds himself
With crystal safeguards known as facts,
But likes the dangerous sounds
Of unattained realities.
Or, scorn this satirical advice
And storm the body of a woman
With words as deliberate as wind,
Yet heavier, and bearing
Colors without a label.
The substance of her hair--
Ethereal stems that continue their quest
Beyond the warped confines of sight--
Shows the darkness of intellect
Answering a miniature sunset
Whose dying light does not quite succumb.
The steep reserve of her forehead
Has been kindled by a flat burden
Pale as the cry of a child, yet carrying
The hint of trouble found in late afternoon.
Her eyes hold emotional evening,
With spurts of dawn remaining like anxious relics
Kept alive by unsatisfied designs
From that derided realm where logic dies.
Her breast is the color that a north wind
Would have if it were visible to eyes.
Upon her body, color in light and darkness
Subdues the ribald ponderousness of life
And brings the filmy, flashing seriousness
Detested by the prostrate toil of mud;
Hated in taverns at midnight;
Banished from every couch when morning
Rearranges the ancient jest.

RELUCTANT LADY

The widely bruised, shy beauty of a brain
That renders dogmas bashful with its breath
Will raise its last, wan offering to death--
A poise of gossamer that takes the rain
Of darkness, with an unexpectant pride.
Your thoughts are old and yet too young for life
Whose ponderous sneer preserves their curling strife.
They wait for heavy spear-points, side by side.

You are a wilted pilgrim on a road
Where hills and rubbish-pits receive alike
The skeptical remonstrance of your pace.
You pass through towns and raise your thoughtful load
To shield your loves against the words that strike
The sheer, elastic trouble of your face.

PSYCHOLOGY FROM MARS

Torban flattered the details
Of his festival in brown--a beard--
With fingers that held a musical length,
And spoke of psychology.
The clever reproduction
Of a human being,
His appearance lacked
A hairsbreadth of reality
And barely failed to convince.
His eyes, assemblages of planets
Miraculously dwarfed, were small
But did not hold the shifting gluttony
Common to little eyes.
His lips were unsubstantial fibres
And the straight line of his nose
Gained an unearthly sincerity.
His body was muscular but failed to reveal
The smug delusion of superiority
That lives within physical strength.
With a voice in which pity and satire
Mingled bewilderedly with each other,
He spoke of psychology.
“Normal and average men
On Mars are charged with being
Insane and distorted oracles.
Because they desire to resemble each other
We force them to live together
On drably elaborate plateaus.
There they fashion cities--
Geometrical madness
That censures shreds of dread and unrest
Within the spaces of its heart.
There they retreat to farms,
And the disciplined exhaustion
Of their lives reclines upon
Monotonous rewards known as harvests.
They cling to homes--slumbering alcoves
Plentifully supplied
With complimenting mirrors
And altars for the mind.
Sometimes a revolution
Seduces their living flatness,
And an original confusion
Follows rumours of creation,
But the sanity vanishes
Into the marching unison
Of their repentant madness.
We who are sane live below the plateaus.
‘Home’ to us is a flitting answer:
Different spots inevitably
Transformed by our bodies garlanded with mind,
Or requests of the heart
That tarry a moment for shelter.
As we wander we tear
And rebuild ancient lanes and houses,
Leaving a sentinel of change
Behind to confront the next traveller.
We stroll in twos and threes
That endure for a day or an hour,
And we never linger
At one place to gloat over details.
Restless sanity, my friend,
Equips the changing cries within us.
Restless sanity
Prevents us from complacently
Dozing over miniatures,
With a dream of importance
Rocking within the rhythms of our hearts!”

TO TIME

O Time, you are an idiot’s fluid curse.
O Time, you are an uninspired hearse.
O Time, you kill beneath your robe of nurse.

O Time, your eyes are cherubs drowned in pools,
O Time, your wisdom scorns the aid of stools,
O Time, your kindness blinds the life of fools.

O Time, you blur pretentious intellect.
O Time, you break the thrones that thoughts erect.
O Time, your hands indifferently correct

The incoherent sorceries of men
Who dance before a monstrous Axe and Pen,
Waving the fetiches of words, and then

Censure the dance with pedestals of gauze
Cleverly imitating rock, and laws
Whose opaque sureness broods above their cause.

When irony will cease to be obscure
To men whose eyes resent the cloudy lure
That ends their tiny clarities, with pure

And forming mists of words, then men will climb
With restless regularity, like Time,
Who merely seeks a changing pantomime.

O Time, you are too pure and swiftly wide
For men who try to check your colored stride
With opaque temples and a sleeping bride.

DECADENT DUET

_Torban_

Lightly sharp and even,
Your voice is the sound of an airplane
Darting high above your unreceptive face.
Your voice is unrelated
To the structure of your face,
And on your lips an echo merely rides,
The pagan shimmerings of your face
Receive the voice with a subtle disbelief.
Indeed, your intellectuality,
Speeding though spaces over your head,
Must seem of little consequence
To the nymph who listens far below.
That you are thus divided is not strange,
But you contain a third Self
And it regards the other two
With a grave and patient interest.

_Woman_

Phantasmagoria,
Ruling arabesques of words,
Your attenuated variations
Of thought and emotion will enrage
The blunt convictions of more earthly men.
The pagan rituals of my face
Distrust your words, and my mind,
Dropping its voice from fancied heights,
Resents the indirectness of your style.
But the third Self within me,
Generous and immobile of face,
Cares only for the skill
With which you elevate
Vainly celebrating shades
Of thought and protesting emotion.
Color, form, and substance--
Three complaining slaves
Engraving the details of prearranged tasks
Within stationary brains and hearts.
My third Self would release them
To an original abandon
That exchanges intangible countries,
With a gracious, gaudy treason.

_Torban_

Lacking a better name
I will call your third Self “soul.”
The ancient, merry game
Of fighting over labels
Must not dismay our duet.
To most men soul exists
Only when their sensual weariness
Needs to be gilded with a religion
Or a deified memory of flesh.
We contain a lurking wanderer
Upon our inner roads, and he
Sometimes stops to drop pitying hands
Upon the forms of thought and emotions
Branded with scores of prejudices.
Men have hated him for centuries,
And hatred, symbol of sly cowardice,
Has draped its desire in false scorn
And named him Decadence.
Thus ends our decadent duet.
Come, there are roads on which we must pirouette.
The proper contrast will be furnished
By philosophers, scientists, and sensualists.

POEM TO A POLICEMAN

Marionnette-fanatic,
Your active club within this riot
Was once the passive integrity
Of a branch upon a tree.
Now without success
It tries to beat out fire
Writhing in human skulls.
The pause of nature, transformed
Survival of every memory and defeat,
Separates to bits of action
Aiding an inexplicable fever.
The hands of centuries press
These bits into another
Pause before corruption.
O pernicious circle,
I will not believe
That your parsimonious farce
Reiterates itself through space.
The souls of men achieve
An accidental dream
That seems important merely
Because the figures which it holds
Have invented small and almost
Non-existent divisions of time.
Yet, trapped within these months and years,
I turn to you, marionnette-fanatic.
You at least can bring
Diversion to my chained
Impatience as I wait for death.
How wildly you protect
The sluggish minds of men!
A calculating laziness of thought
Has created you to guard its doors,
While other men require
An outward expression of peace
Beneath which the inner struggle
Can revel in privacy.
And so, with buttons of brass
And blue uniform that lend
An incongruous dignity
To your task, you defend
The myriads of insincerities
That drape a mutilated need.
And yet, unconsciously,
And at rare times you save
The face of beauty from an old
Insult in the fists of men.
Yes, you are not entirely
Without extenuation,
Marionnette-fanatic.

INTIMATE SCENE

Bed-room, you have earned
The sympathy of dirt,
And bear upon your air
Malevolent and thwarted
Essences of men.
Many contorters of bellies
Have stirred an urgent travesty
Shielded by your greasy dusk,
And hearts have found upon your couch
A brief, delicious insult.
Cheap room within a lodging-house,
You are not merely space
For the coronation of flesh,
And your odorous bed-quilts
Need not only provoke
The casual jeering of thought.