III.
Night has thrown his ecstasy
Of staring, counterfeit eyes
Over the torrent of this street.
Men with faces quicker
And more furtive than time
Stand motionless in doorways.
Women stride down this street.
Many fingers have pulled their faces
To a haggard lack of expression.
They join the motionless men
In the doorways and disappear.
And over them the tame and ghastly coffins
Display their shamefaced grays and reds
Against the tangled vividness of night.
LANDSCAPE
The countless vagaries of maple leaves,
Elastic humbleness of flowers and weeds,
The hill, a placid stoic to all creeds,
They use an obvious language that deceives
The subtle theories of human ears.
Their tongue is motion and they scorn the rhyme
And meter made by men to soothe their fears.
Beneath the warm strength of each August hour
They spurn cohesion and the plans of thought,
With quick simplicity that seems confused
Because it signals mystic whims that tower
Above the thoughts and loves that men have caught:
Beyond the futile words that men have used.
COUNTRY GIRL
Your face is stencilled with a pensiveness.
Your face contains a minor lyric trapped
By dainty ignorance, and tamely capped
By hair as trimly lifeless as your dress.
You suffer from the drooling praise of old
And youthful men, who strive to win a blind
And soothing admiration from your mind,
And do not try to make your thoughts unfold.
This comedy would fade into a host
If it were not rewarded by the dead
But unrelenting poet on your face.
Your eyes are heavy with his reckless ghost:
The trouble of his hands is on your head
As you peer out into a clouded space.
NONDESCRIPT TYPIST
Within an office whose exterior
Resembles an ultra-conservative mind
You battle with the avaricious words
Of a meager, petrified man.
Your face is brown stagnation
Sometimes astounded by a thrust
Of chattering wistfulness.
Bravery is fear
Effectively sneering at itself,
And you are forever wavering
Upon the edge of this condition.
Yet your obscurity
Is an important atom
In the mysterious march of time.
CONCERNING EMOTIONS
And if I say that pain is but
A circus barker whose loud cries
Seek to reward a trivial show,
Will you confess that I am wise?
“Must it be emotional?” you asked,
After I had thrown
Words into a carnival-scope.
Sobriety and merriment
Borrowed the sixteenth century
Within your voice, and sought
The identity of sternness—
Mental sternness pretending to ignore
The confetti thrown by emotion
In a carnival unique.
Emotions can be prancing curves
Fashioned by relaxing thoughts.
Should I kiss you, Questioner,
The delicate anti-climax
Of a mental caper
Might perish on crimson vapor!
Tired of frenzies and satiations
Emotions often wander to poets
And ask for more fantastic decisions
For fire that glows but does not burn.
METAPHYSICAL ELIZABETH
They gave you strait-jackets to bore you.
Like an unwilling promise
Your legs were tied together.
But people can only violate
Their own conception of reality,
And your actual curves
Preserved their sculptural liberty.
Leaving their semblance on your flesh
Your lines sped inward till they gained
The center where emotion changes
To a speck of quivering clarity.
Within you phantoms of reality
Danced with plausibilities of mind,
Seeking to be consumed
By the oblivion which is understanding.
You feared that your return to motion
Would mean a succession of disappointments—
Tamely grazing arrows
Changed to wounds by the desiring heart
Take my hand and move.
Only two statues can stride together
In a manner invisible
Save to certain unreasonable adjustments
Of eyesight and of hearing.
DESCRIPTION AND EXHORTATION
Truly, this age will be known
As one of minute extremes
Courting an elderly shape
In a violent bar-room scene.
An Amazon made filthy by centuries,
And fuming pygmies, own the stage.
Thin furies of emotion
Name every color in the rainbow
Without its skillful assent,
And little mental skeletons
Stamp with clumsy weirdness
On effigies of the heart.
The pygmies often sneak
To the prancing Amazon
And the ensuing love-scene produces
Small memories of Walt Whitman.
This age is not metaphysical.
Followers of Dada,
Weary of electron-soliloquies
And fleshly ecstasies with flat feet,
Sit in the gallery
And throw loose malice at the display,
Evading their motives with an eager creed.
Concentrate your aim,
Followers of Dada.
INEVITABLE
The insurrection of a flea
Compared to driving tusks
Of elephants, is just as strong.
Stupidity need not be long.
The insurrection of a flea
Attains philosophy and spice.
Fleas salt their eating with a creed
That warms the monotone of greed.
The insurrection of a flea
Will leave with tense insistence till
The suburbs of eternity.
O small fanatic on a spree.
The flea is poet in a land
That does not understand his lunge.
He makes his own immaculate laws
And awaits forever threatening claws.
THE NEGROES WHO TURNED WHITE
The souls of negroes, thrown into a shout,
Roll their hallelujahs out
To the flashing blandness of the sky.
The sky does not divide their cries
Into meanings foolish and wise:
To the sky all men have but one cry.
Still, amusement has often thrown
Separate shades upon the monotone,
Playing with the sleep of firm beliefs.
Amused, we give these negroes forms
Distinct and bounding under storms
Of sounds that catapult their joys and griefs.
A negro with his bald despair
Seduced by remnants of silver hair,
Converses with an old King known as God.
He longs to have his tortured stare
Rewarded with a golden chair
While other negroes thump the sod
With heavy echoes of his request.
With a cold, castrated zest
He pleads for rest, and he is bold,
While scientists and troubadours
Cling more closely to their floors.
“How d’yah kno-ow, how d’yah kno-o-ow
Dat the blood done sign mah na-a-ame?
Yes it’s so-o-o, yes it’s so-o-o,
Jesus wrote it down in fla-a-ame.”
The other negroes sing
With gliding fear, and swing
The child-like joke of their arms to emotions
That surge like an army searching for its eyes.
But suddenly a quick surprise
Tricks each negro’s face with fright—
Their skins are gleaming pink and white.
White philosophers and scientists
Strike each other with dubious fists
Within the negroes’ brains, while poets fight
Like blistered urchins wrapped in gloom.
Shrinking underneath the uproar
With its bursts of phantom gore,
The negroes shriek against their doom.
With bending celebration of knees
They crush against their leader’s pleas.
“Lord Almighty, make us black!
This strange noise strikes us on the back!
We has had enough of whips!
Calm this devil with your lips!”
EXPRESSIONS ON A CHILD’S FACE
Dawn?—no, the hunted transparency of dawn
Curving from the white throat of a child
And shaken in the still cup of his face.
Then a sudden dispersal of swerving light
Carrying away the defeated
Wisdom of a smile.
Thought?—no, the persistent shudder
Of emotion that is almost thought.
The invisible recklessness of perfume
Enveloping the beginning of a question.
Sadness?—no, the growth of a dim inclination
To delve into the rancid importance of flesh:
Then weeping, to wash away
The ritual of disappointment.
PSYCHIC CLOWNS
First Clown
We gaze upon a negro shoveling coal.
His muscles fuse into a poem
Stifled and sinister,
Censuring the happy rhetoric of morning air.
Some day he will pitch the stretched simplicity
Of his tent upon the contented ruins
Of a civilization,
Playing with documents and bottles of perfume
Found in deserted, broken corridors.
Second Clown
The barbarous comedy
Lost in profuse confessions
And often described as life,
Lends an attitude of conviction
To the mechanical retreat of time.
First Clown
Do you hear beneath the irregular strut
Of this city an imperceptible groan?
Time is turning the jail-house key.
They build larger jails for time;
He makes larger keys of blood-stained iron.
Endlessly he emerges
From complicated delusions of freedom.
Second Clown
That desperately grotesque
Wanton known as imagination
Can plunge beyond both men and time.
Imagination slips down
Upon the last edges of thought and feeling
And teaches them to transcend
The forlorn bravado of swinging legs and arms.
First Clown
We are two psychic clowns
Brandishing the poverty of words
Into insolent oddities of sound.
Come, men are waiting to nail us
Upon the crucifix of their little logics!
DEAR MINNA
Catastrophe in a bric-a-brac shop.
The proprietor lies murdered.
Pieces of cups, jars, and vases
Have attained the disorderly freedom
So obnoxious to bankrupt fanatics.
Once the cups, jars, and vases
Were symmetrical and empty,
And immersed in the task of holding nothing.
Now they have snatched a voice from fragments;
Spell many an accidental sentence;
Renounce the hollow lie.
Death, you take the stiffly obvious shapes
Of objects and crack them with your fingers—
A shattered invitation
To curiosity and anticipation—
And I am grateful to you for that.
My eyes grow weary scanning the living array.
Each man takes his inch upon the shelves
And will not move, until your paw
Robs him of microscopical convictions.
Dear Minna, read the newspapers
And gloat with me over death’s industry.
Banker, Freudian, Socialist,
Knocked from the shelves and changed
To symbols that can lure conjecture.
It is well that we are metaphysical.
Death must not become
A mere black frame surrounding
The memorized reiterations.
Death must remain an irresistible
Beckoning to reckless speculations
And continue to offer an amorous arm
To the recalcitrant antics of words.
VILLAGE CLERK
Rabelais and Maeterlinck
Have subsided to one grin
Upon your sharply cumbersome face.
Coarseness and a psychic hope
Dominate your voice
As you prattle to women
Purchasing sugar and salt.
Then your face and voice
Alter to a serious fraud
Eagerly learning the technique of deceptions,
As you answer this dryly emasculated
Grey-beard, discussing the tendencies in hogs.
When the night replenishes
Your store of morbid desires,
You will try to piece together
A cajoling violin
From your sweet-heart’s syllables,
Fumbling with hot hands for the unseen strings.
REALISM
Regard an American farm.
That jaded collaborator,
Daylight, has just arrived.
Wavy signal of smoke
From the wooden farm-house disappears
Beneath the bluely ascetic lack of interest.
Horses, pigs, and cows
Assemble their discontent.
The result is a Chinese orchestra
Devoid of discipline and cohesion,
With all of the players intoxicated.
The animals do not realize
That their voices should portray
The farmer in the angular house;
The hackneyed prose of his life;
The expanding soul of his corn-fields.
Turn from the absence of human wisdom
And see the lights in the farm-house.
Dimly circumscribed and steady,
They symbolize future events.
The farm-hand walks to the barn,
With an ox-like dragging of feet.
Black shirt, and overalls
Whose color has been removed by dirt,
Obscure the heavy knots of his body.
His cork-screw nose ascends
To the eyes of an unperturbed pig.
Love and hate to him
Are mouthfuls of coarse food hastily gulped
During lulls in his muscular slavery.
Beneath the slanting pungency
Of the barn he vanishes,
And with meaningless sounds
He pays his meager tribute to life.
Then the farmer persuades his age
To indulge in an unwilling stumble
Across the yard.
His grey beard is the end of a rope
That has gradually throttled his face.
Within him, avarice
Is awkwardly practising the rhythms
Of weak emotions benignly, belatedly
Preparing for celestial rewards.
Within the cluttered farm-yard
He stands, a figure of niggardly order.
Earth, the men who scrape at your flanks
Can never stop to examine
The thin line of speech that goes adventuring
Where your brown hills bite the sky.
AMERICAN VAUDEVILLE SHOW
This vacuous, clattering spectacle
Has collected the heart-beats of a nation.
Greed, like a gorged Machiavelli,
Slumps down in the green plush seat
And wonders whether it has not blundered,
While a sentimental song,
Like a kindly infant,
Interferes with the clink of coins.
Hatred, juvenile and deformed,
Earns the smirking oblivion
Of fat women mangling sound.
The wrangling babble of ignorance
Turns to silence underneath
The opium of innuendoes.
Acrobats appear and seem
To be raping phantom lovers
No longer beautiful and fresh
But mechanically endured.
Part of the audience is also
A battered stoic clasping worn-out mistresses.
Clog-dancers enervate
The thumping martyrs of their feet,
And chorus-girls offer the lines of their bodies
With whining voices.
Dreams are cheap, and green plush seats
Appropriately, snugly hold
The expensive hallucinations.
Printing Service
Company
Chicago