Chapter II: Unliterary and Shameless

_A young woman who has been renounced by her lover, because of her
lack of culture, answers his derision._

Your cloistered naughtiness
Makes me as boisterous
As a savage attending
A minstrel-show of regrets.
The pampered carefulness
With which you distil a series
Of standardized perfumes from life
Takes its promenade
Between the realms of sanity and madness.
You are too precise to be quite sane
And too evasive to be insane,
And all that you have left me
Is a mood of windy sadness--
Emotions becoming verbose
In a last thin effort
To persuade themselves that they loved
A jewel that slipped from your fingers.
Your mind is a limpid warehouse
Filled with other mens’ creations,
And you pilfer a bit from each,
Disguising the scheme of your culture.
I would rather be a naked fool
Than a full-gowned erudite
Imitation of other mens’ hands.
I shall marry a desperado
And give him strength with which to paint
Black angels and muscular contortions
On panels of taffeta.

TWO SONNETS TO MY WIFE

I

Because her voice is Schönberg in a dream
In which his harshness plays with softer keys
This does not mean that it is void of ease
And cannot gather to a strolling gleam.
Her voice is full of manners and they seem
To place a masquerade on thought and tease
Its strength until it finds that it has knees,
And whimsically leaves its heavy scheme.

Discords can be the search of harmony
For worlds that lie beyond the reach of poise
And must be captured with abandoned hands.
The music of my wife strives to be free
And often takes a light, unbalanced voice
While madly walking over thoughtful lands.

II

My wife relents to life and does not speak
Each moment with a deft and rapid note.
Sometimes a clumsy weirdness finds in her throat
And ushers in a music that is weak
And bargains with the groping of her heart.
But even then she plays with graver tones
That do not sell themselves to laughs and moans
But seek the counsel of a deeper art.

She drapes her loud emotions in a shroud
Of glistening thought that waves above their dance
And sometimes parts to show their startled eyes.
The depths of mind within her have not bowed
To sleek emotion with its amorous glance.
She slaps its face and laughs at its surprise!

FINALITIES

I

Pretend that night is grandiose,
That stars win graves in every ditch;
Pretend that moonlight is verbose
And affable, like some grande-mère,
And men will say that your despair
Seduces luminous conceits,
Or call you an anaemic fool
Who stuffs himself with curdled sweets.
Thus sentenced to obscurity,
You can find more turbulent lips
And spaciously retreat from men
Immersed in pedestals and whips.
Amusedly, you can say that stars
Are wizened jests on every ditch;
That moonlight is a trick that jars
Your mind intent on other minds.
Having agreed upon your station,
Men will no longer heed your words,
And with a galloping elation
You can contradict yourself in peace.

II

The wary perturbations of convinced
And secretly disdainful men are mild
And deftly tepid to the ears of one
Who entertains a careless, ungloved child.
Above the sprightly idleness of plates
Men sit and feign industrious respect,
With eye-brows often slightly ill at ease--
Cats in an argument are more erect.
At last the tactful lustres of farewells
Are traded: each man strolls off and forgets
The other--not a frill is disarranged.
The tension dexterously avoids regrets.
Two men have unveiled carved finalities
And made apologies for the event,
With voices well-acquainted with a task
Devoid of nakedness and ornament.
And each man might have murmured, “Yes, I know
What you will say and what I shall reply,”
And each man might have watched the other man
Smile helplessly into his mutton-pie.

III

This farcical clock is copying
A wood-chopper with nimble poise,
While Time, with still and fluid strides,
Perplexedly listens to the noise.
The room that holds this joke is filled
With the relaxed complacencies
Of poets hiding from themselves
With measured trivialities.
But one among them walks about
And watches with embarrassed eyes.
The others do not speak to him:
His nudeness is a tight disguise.
This fool is anxious to display
Interrogations of his mind
To poets who at work and play
Are isolated from their kind.
Reluctantly he finds his room,
Sits on the floor, with legs tucked in,
And grins up at another clock
Aloofly measuring its din.

IV

When you are tired of ogling moltenly,
Your undertones explosively confess.
A shop-girl coughing over her cigarette
Expresses the burlesque of your distress.
Take your cocaine. It leaves a blistering stain,
But phantom diamonds are immune from greed.
You pluck them from the buttons of your vest,
Wildly apologising for your need.
Take more. Redress the thinness of your neck
With diamonds; entertain them with your breast;
Cajole them on the floor with fingertips
That cannot pause, dipped in a demon’s zest.
If you had not relented to a man
Who meddled with your face and stole your clothes,
Your shrill creative pleasures might be still
Incarcerated in the usual pose.
Hysteria shot its fist against your face
One day, and left the blood-spot of your mouth,
But when the morning strikes you there will be
More than hysteria in your answering shout.