Yes, here am I bathed in a maudlin smile!
And here are: you, he, it, and everyone
Except the person who’s alone worth while.
Calmly I rise with broken threads, I run
Stirred by my own intrinsic power to sun
Self-consciousness to flesh-burst—I’ve begun
With unabated sarcasm to rise
In self-opinion, sinking with closed eyes.
A subtle crepitation in the air
As if the nomad camels would return,
As if the burly lion left his lair
To have his hair curled daintily. I burn.
You do not listen: “there’s so much to learn
From scientific data, palimpsest....”
I tell you they will crumble with the rest.
Before the wolf returns to Regent Street,
Before he digs up fashionable tombs,
Before the nightingale with music sweet
Pierces the Piccadilly catacombs,
Before the screech-owl adds to ruin-glooms,
The merry robin-redbreast and the wren
Will trill their notes in Bayswater again.
“The worst of influenza’s over now,
But rents are high ... the weather is not cold
Considering the month of year, but how
The war has broken through our lives! how old”....
Above her grave time soon will rake the mould:
Already she is smouldering away,
Already she is fettled for decay.
Pleasures and vanities, regrets, desires
Dumped on a dung-heap where the lilies grow....
And these shall be their own sad funeral-pyres,
Destruction totters and his steps are slow.
The miles to Babylon? I do not know.
But this I know: these folk on gilded chairs
Had better kneel and say their hopeless prayers.
[C] A line from “Louisville Lou”: a certain fox-trot.
Intermezzo
THAT sinister, that sombre poet-waif
Presses his brow against the window-pane,
(That window-pane of cruel, wicked glass),
Watching the sour and curdled flakes of snow.
With eyes like pale grey membranes fixed and glazed
Ever he stares upon snow-silent fields,
And sweating skies that lean towards the earth
Like a great toper leaning at a bar.
Ever the mournful cries of mountain-apes
Echo, re-echo, and abysmally,
Ever the sour snow falls. And where’s the moon?
It must hang high, oh, somewhere in the heavens.
And somewhere, waking in the middle night
Soft longing arms spread out in love’s embrace
Find nothing, no one; in a dazed despair
Grope for a form to clasp, to touch, and then
Fall limply back in dismal loneliness.
Perpetual Penelopes unspin
The webs they spun meticulous at day.
Somewhere the honey-throated nightingale
Is voiceless for the burden of his love,
And somewhere it is good to be alive....
That sinister, that sombre poet-waif
So tired to tears and tearless, with those eyes
Airily floating in eternal stare,
Bartered his soul for void philosophies.
But suddenly he flings a weary laugh
And walks into the jangling painted world.