Chapter IV: Old Man

Below your skull a social gathering glows.
Weak animosities exchange a last
Chat with emotional ambassadors
Who honor the importance of your past.
You turn your hammock and surrender limbs
To sunlight, and increase the hammock’s swing
As though you suavely bargained with a friend.
Its answers are impersonal and bring
A tolerance that wounds your lack of strength.
A final insurrection cleaves your rest.
You raise your back, then lower it convinced
That motion now would be a needless test....
And with your falling back, the gathering
Within your head melts through a door, chagrined,
And everything within you dies except
A blue and golden hammock in the wind.

UNEASY REFLECTIONS

Determinedly peppered with signs,
The omnibus ambles without curiosity.
Southampton Row, Malborne Road, Charing Cross--
These names have no relation
To the buildings they partition
If one mutters, “I shall go to Euston Road,”
Imagination is relieved of all errands
And, decently ticketed, enters the omnibus.
If one muttered, “I shall go to protesting angles,
Surreptitiously middle-aged,
And find a reticent line to play with,”
One would violate
The hasty convenience of labels
And seriously examine one’s destination.
If poplar-trees, brief violets and green glades
On any country road had each received
An incongruous name--Smith’s Tree,
C. Jackson’s Clump, or Ferguson’s Depression--
And city streets had never known a label,
Most poets would have turned their fluid obsession
On lamp-posts and the grandeur of ash-cans.
It would be grimly realistic now
To write about a violet or a cow.

SUMMER EVENING: NEW YORK SUBWAY-STATION

Perspiring violence derides
The pathetic collapse of dirt.
An effervescence of noises
Depends upon cement for its madness.
Electric light is taut and dull,
Like a nauseated suspense.
This kind of heat is the recollection
Of an orgy in a swamp.
Soiled caskets joined together
Slide to rasping stand-stills.
People savagely tamper
With each other’s bodies,
Scampering in and out of doorways.
Weighted with apathetic bales of people
The soiled caskets rattle on.
The scene consists of mosaics
Jerkily pieced together and blown apart.
A symbol of billowing torment,
This sturdy girl leans against an iron girder.
Weariness has loosened her face
With its shining cruelty.
Round and poverty-stricken
Her face renounces life.
Her white cotton waist is a wet skin on her breast:
Her black hat, crisp and delicate,
Does not understand her head.
An old man stoops beside her,
Sweat and wrinkles erupting
Upon the blunt remnants of his face.
A little black pot of a hat
Corrupts his grey-haired head.

Two figures on a subway-platform,
Pieced together by an old complaint.

GARBAGE-HEAP

The wind was shrill and mercenary,
Like a housewife pacing down the sky.
Green weeds and tin-cans in the yard
Made a debris of ludicrous dissipations.
The ochre of cold elations
Had settled on the cans.
Their brilliant labels peeped from the weeds,
Like the remains of a charlatan.
A bone reclined against a fence-post
And mouldily congratulated life.
A woman’s garter wasted its faded frills
Upon a newspaper argument.
The shipwrecked rancor of bottles and boxes
Was pressed to disfigured complexities.
A smell of torrential asperity
Knew the spirit of the yard.

Contented or incensed,
The wreckage stood in the yard,
One shade below the sardonic.

IMPULSIVE DIALOGUE

_Poet_

Will you, like other men,
Offer me indigo indignities?

_Undertaker_

Indigo indignities!
The words are like a mermaid and a saint
Doubting each other’s existence with a kiss.

_Poet_

The words of most men kiss
With satiated familiarity.
Indigo is dark and vehement,
But one word in place of two
Angers barmaids and critics.

_Undertaker_

Straining after originality
You argue with its ghost!
A simple beauty, like morning
Harnessed by a wide sparkle
And plodding into the hearts of men,
Cannot reach your frantic juggling.

_Poet_

I can appreciate
The spontaneous redundancy of nature
Without the aid of an echo
From men who lack her impersonal size.

_Undertaker_

The sweeping purchase of an evening
By an army of stars;
The bold incoherence of love;
The peaceful mountain-roads of friendship--
These things evade your dexterous epigrams!

_Poet_

A statue, polished and large,
Dominates when it stands alone.
Placed in a huge profusion of statues
Its outlines become humiliated.
Simplicity demands one gesture
And men give it endless thousands.
Complexity wanders through a forest,
Glimpsing details in the gloom.

_Undertaker_

I do not crave the dainty pleasure
Of chasing ghosts in a forest!
Nor do I care to pluck
Exaggerated mushrooms in the gloom.
I have lost myself on roads
Crossed by tossing hosts of men.
Pain and anger have scorched our slow feet:
Peace has washed our foreheads.

_Poet_

Futility, massive and endless,
Captures a stumbling grandeur
Embalmed in history.
In my forest you could see this
From a distance and lose
Your limited intolerance.
Simplicity and subtlety
At different times are backgrounds for each other,
Changing with the position of our eyes.
Death will burn your eyes
With his taciturn complexity.

_Undertaker_

Death will strike your eyes
With his wild simplicity!

_Poet_

Words are soldiers of fortune
Hired by different ideas
To provide an importance for life
But within the glens of silence
They meet in secret peace....
Undertaker, do you make of death
A puffing wretch forever pursued
By duplicates of vanquished forms?
Or do you make him a sneering King
Brushing flies from his bloodless cheeks?
Do you see him as an unappeased brooding
Walking over the dust of men?
Do you make him an eager giant
Discovering and blending into his consciousness
The tiny parts of his limitless mind?

_Undertaker_

Death and I do not know each other.
I am the stolid janitor
Who cleans the litter he has left
And claims a fancied payment.

_Poet_

Come to my fantastic forest
And you will not need to rise
From simple labours, asking death
For final wages.

EMOTIONAL MONOLOGUE

_A man is sitting within the enigmatic turmoil of a railroad station.
His face is narrow and young, and his nose, lips, and eyes carved to
a Semitic sharpness, have been sundered by a bloodless catastrophe.
A traveling-bag stands at his feet. Around him people are clutching
farewells and shouting greetings. Within him a monologue addresses an
empty theatre._

I am strangling emotions
And casting them into the seats
Of an empty theatre.
When my lifeless audience is complete,
The ghosts of former emotions
Will entertain their dead masters.
After each short act
A humorous ghost will fly through the audience,
Striking the limp hands into applause,
And between the acts
Sepulchral indifference will mingle
With the dust upon the backs of seats.
Upon the stage a melodrama
And a travesty will romp
Against a back-drop of fugitive resignation.
Climax and anti-climax
Will jilt each other and drift
Into a cheated insincerity.
Sometimes the lights will retire
While a shriek and laugh
Make a martyr of the darkness.
When the lights reappear
An actor-ghost will assure the audience
That nothing has happened save
The efforts of a fellow ghost
To capture life again.
In his role of usher
Another ghost will arrange
The lifeless limbs of the audience
Into postures of relief.
Sometimes a comedy will trip
The feet of an assassin,
Declaring that if ghosts were forced
To undergo a second death
Their thinness might become unbearable.
At other times indignant tragedy
Will banish an intruding farce,
Claiming that life should not retain
The luxury of another laugh.
The first act of the play will show
The owner of the theatre
Conversing with the ghost of a woman.
As unresponsive as stone
Solidly repelling a spectral world,
His words will keenly betray
The bloodless control of his features.
He will say: “With slightly lowered shoulders,
Because of a knife sticking in my back,
I shall trifle with crowded highways,
Buying decorations
For an interrupted bridal-party.
This process will be unimportant
To the workshop of my mind
Where love and death are only
Colourless problems upon a chart.”
The ghost of the woman will say:
“Your mind is but the rebellious servant
Of sensitive emotions
And brings them clearer dominance.”
And what shall I mournfully answer?
I am strangling emotions
And casting them into the seats
Of an empty theatre.

PRONOUNCED FANTASY

A negro girl with skin
As black as a psychic threat,
And plentiful swells of blonde hair,
Sat at a badly tuned piano
And vanquished her fingers upon the keys.
A midnight exultation
Fastened itself on her face,
Quivering over the shrouded prominence
Of her lips and nose.
Her dress was pink and short,
And hung upon her tall, thin body,
Like a lesson in buffoonery.
She lectured her heart on the piano
With violence of minor chords.
Her voice was a prisoner
Whose strong hands turned the bars of his cell
Into musical strings.
_Wen’ tuh Houston, tuh get mah trunk,
Did’n get mah trunk, but ah got dam’ drunk.
Well, ahm satisfi-i-ied
Cause ah gotta be-e-e-ee._
The negro girl turned and cursed
With religious incision
At a parrot in a white spittoon.
He pampered his derision
While she played another tune.
Then he saw her long blonde hair
And paused in the midst of his squawk.