What steam of blood or kidney pie?

What blasts of Bantu melody?

Ragtime. . . . But when the wearied Band

Swoons to a waltz, I take her hand.

And there we sit in blissful calm,

Quietly sweating palm to palm.


FATIGUE

THE mind has lost its Aristotelian elegance of shape: there is only a darkness where bubbles and inconsequent balloons float up to burst their luminous cheeks and vanish.

A woman with a basket on her head: a Chinese lantern quite askew: the vague bright bulging of chemists’ window bottles; and then in my ears the distant noise of a great river of people. And phrases, phrases—