LIGHTNING zigzags and again
Comets reel like tipsy girls,
Bulbous clouds let down the rain,
Little silver chains of pearls.
Through the frenzied city beats
A bourdon-drumming, heavy, low.
In long and apoplectic streets
The gods are passing to and fro.
I watch them walk among the crowds,
Their beards a-glittering with stars,
Until they merge into the clouds
Among the chimney’s fat cigars.
While lovers in their foolishness
Lisp out the night with hopes and fears,
Whilst into void and emptiness
Time clatters off and disappears.
As Dmitri Karamazoff sang on the way to Chaos
EIGHT days without a sun: but I am calm
And cultivate my tulips fixedly,
I watch them flick their flighty freckled tongues
Mocking and sweetly monstrous blares of time.
(We weep to see you haste away so soon!)
The gas is near extinct upon the plush,
Like the last birds its flares have ebbed away.
Blue witness of the Second Empire, gas!—
In cabriolets we echoed through the night
And caracoled with busselled courtesans—
You lit the boulevards and avenues,
While Paul Verlaine, a candle in his hand,
Would totter up to bed and watch the moon
Comme un point sur un i—so orotund....
Through fumes and crapulous velleities.
But now the batteries like headaches beat
Against the temples of humanity;
A network of pure electricity
Installed for quick transmission through the world
Pours a perpetual electric day.
Men plough their fields by searchlights from the skies,
By searchlights blatant, geometrical,
As fingers from each god-like aeroplane
Pointed to each created mass of flesh
Accusing and forewarning.
O empresses of jade who slumber on your cushions,
Who slumber delicately on your cushions!
If we were moulded of a subtle stone
Instead of being merely flesh and bone,
We’d imitate your cool and elegant curves.
To chill green jade our hot and shattered nerves
Would clot or petrify or fossilize—
And moss to moist the finnèd lids of eyes,
Lush velvet soaking on the irises
Looped round with tiredness and its swollen reds
Would grow about our damask four-post beds.
We would be green, an ecstasy of green!
As small sea-violets, virgin forest’s green,
Where trees like coral sponges dab the air,
And through each weft you hear a piece of wind,
A tiny concertina-push of sound
And then an inrush, sobbing gently inward.
Why do we drown in customs, why become
Lost dying flames and strangers to the skies
Whose beams with clouds like wingèd chariots fly?
Why do we climb the towers which break our knees,
Horrible towers from which, when we look down
We wish to hurl ourselves?
O, then the ant-like herd below would feel
A gentle spray of entrails—they’d recoil!—
Perhaps one woman faints: we do not care,
The worm has not become our paramour,
The worm has not yet pierced our winding-sheets.
Then why not, like Empedocles,
Lower our limbs into volcano-craters,
And make the world believe that mighty God
Translated us into His company
On dolphins’ backs across a nectar lake,
To share the glory of His attributes,
His love like myrrh and incense and the fruits
That dangle from exotic herbs and trees
All gold and ripe as from Hesperides?