ADVICE

NEW POETRY
FALL, 1920

OCTOBER

By Robert Bridges

THE FORERUNNER

By Kahlil Gibran

WORDSWORTH: AN ANTHOLOGY

By R. Cobden-Sanderson

ADVICE

By Maxwell Bodenheim

ADVICE

A BOOK OF POEMS

By MAXWELL BODENHEIM

NEW YORK
ALFRED·A·KNOPF
1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
ALFRED A. KNOPF, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO
MINNA
WHOSE SMILE IS MY THRONE

Some of the poems which compose this book have appeared in the Yale Review, the Smart Set, the New Republic, Reedy’s Mirror, the Dial, the Touchstone, the Little Review, Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, the Century, and the New York Tribune. They are good, in spite of their numerous appearances.

CONTENTS

ADVICE

ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT

Lacerated grey has bitten

Into your shapeless humility.

Little episodes of roving

Strew their hieroglyphics on your muteness.

Life has given you heavy stains

Like an ointment growing stale.

Endless feet tap over you

With a maniac insistence.

O unresisting street-pavement,

Keep your passive insolence

At the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet.

Only one who lies upon his back

Can disregard the stars.

ADVICE TO A BUTTER-CUP

Undistinguished butter-cup

Lost among myriads of others,

To the red ant eyeing you

You are giant stillness.

He pauses on the boulder of a clod,

Baffled by your nearness to the sky.

But to the black loam at your feet

You are the atom of a pent-up dream.

Undistinguished butter-cup,

Take your little breath of contemplation,

Undisturbed by haughty tricks of space.

ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAM-BOAT

The brass band plays upon your decks,

Like a sturdy harlot aping mirth,

And people in starched shields

Stuff their passions with sweet words,

Life is swishing in the air,

Like a tipsy, unseen bridegroom.

O humbly grunting river boat,

Take the churning water and the sun

Like one who plays with his own chains

And flings their turmoil to the sky.

Only a voice can leap above high walls.

FOUNDRY WORKERS

Brown faces twisted back

Into an ecstasy of tight resistance;

Eyes that are huge sweat drops

Unheeded by the struggle underneath them—

Throughout the night you stagger under walls

Where life is squeezed to squealing bitterness.

Beneath your heaving flash of limbs

Your thoughts are smashed to a dejected trance

And you are swept, like empty mites,

Into a glistening frenzy of motion....

Yet, on a Sunday afternoon

I have seen you straightening your backs with slow smiles;

Walking through the streets

And patiently groping for lost outlines.

Your lips were placid bruises

Almost fearing to relax,

And often out upon some green

Your legs swung themselves into long lost shapes.

Perhaps upon your death-beds

You will lift your hands, with a wraith of grace,

Showing life a last, weak curve

Of the rhythm he could not kill.

ADVICE TO A HORNÈD TOAD

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes

And thrown a splintered end upon your blood.

Night and day have vanished

To you, who squat and watch

Years loosen one sand grain until

Its fall becomes your moment.

Tall things plunge over you,

Slashing their dreams with motion

That holds the death of all they seek,

But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples,

Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness.

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown,

Never hop from your grey rock crevice

Mute with interwoven beginnings and ends.

The fluid lies of motion

Leave no remembrance behind.

ADVICE TO A FOREST

O trees, to whom the darkness is a child

Scampering in and out of your long, green beards;

O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim

Counting his dreams within your hermitage

And slipping down the road, in twilight robes;

O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound

Reeling with the beat of your caught feet,

Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred,

When little men come to fell you.

These men will saw you into strips

Of pointed brooding, blind with paint,

But underneath you men will chase

The grey staccato of their lives

Down a glaring maze of walls

Much harder than your own.

And when, at last, the deep brown gaze

Of stolidly amorous time steals over you,

The little men who bit into your hearts

Will stray off in a patter of rabbits’ feet.

Look down upon these children then

With the aloof and weary tolerance

That all still things possess,

O trees, to whom the darkness was a child

Scampering in and out of your long, green beards.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE I

Rounded to a wide eyed clownishness

Crowned by the shifting bravado

Of his long, brown ears,

The rabbit peeked at the sky.

To him, the sky seemed an angelic

Pasture stripped to phantom tranquility,

Where one could nibble thoughtfully.

He longed to leave his mild furtiveness

And speak to a boldness puzzled by his flesh.

With one long circle of despairing grace

He flashed into the air,

Leaping toward his heaven.

But down he crashed against a snake

Who ate him with a meditative interest.

From that day on the snake was filled

With little, meek whispers of concern.

The crushed and peaceful rabbit’s dream

Cast a groping hush upon his blood.

He curled inertly on a rock,

In cryptic, wilted savageness.

In the end, his dry, grey body

Was scattered out upon the rock,

Like a story that could not be told.

ADVICE TO A BLUE-BIRD

Who can make a delicate adventure

Of walking on the ground?

Who can make grass-blades

Arcades for pertly careless straying?

You alone, who skim against these leaves,

Turning all desire into light whips

Moulded by your deep blue wing-tips,

You who shrill your unconcern

Into the sternly antique sky.

You to whom all things

Hold an equal kiss of touch.

Mincing, wanton blue-bird,

Grimace at the hoofs of passing men.

You alone can lose yourself

Within a sky, and rob it of its blue!

TO A FRIEND

Your head is steel cut into drooping lines

That make a mask satirically meek:

Your face is like a tired devil weak

From drinking many vague and unsought wines.

The sullen skepticism of your eyes

For ever trying to transcend itself,

Is often entered by a wistful elf

Who sits naïvely unperturbed and wise.

And this same remnant, with its youthful wiles

Held curiously apart from blasphemies,

Twirls starlight shivers out upon your sneers

And changes them to little, startled smiles.

And all your insolence drops to its knees

Before the half-won grandeur of past years.

ADVICE TO A WOMAN

The sloping lines of your shoulders

Speak of Chinese pagodas.

They clash with your western face

Where child and courtesan

Clasp each other in a feigned embrace.

Life, to you, is a liquid mirror.

You stand with delicate, perpetual amazement,

Vainly seeking your reflection.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE II

August sauntered down the mountain-side,

Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay.

The air was like an old priest

Disrobing without embarrassment

Before the dark and candid gaze of night.

But these things brought no pause

To the saucily determined squirrel.

His eyes were hungrily upturned

To where the stars hung—icily clustered nuts

Dotting trees of solitude.

He saw the stars just over the horizon,

And they seemed to grow

On trees that he could reach.

So he scampered on, from branch to branch,

Wondering why the fairy nut-trees

Ran away from him.

But, looking down, he spied

A softly wild cheeked mountain pool,

And there a handful of fairy nuts

Bit into the indigo cupping them.

With a squeal of weary happiness

The squirrel plunged into the mountain pool,

And as he drowned within its soundless heart

The fairy nuts were jigging over him,

Like the unheard stirring of a poem.

ADVICE TO A BUTTERFLY

Aimless petal of the wind,

Spinning gently weird circles,

To the flowers underneath

You are a drunken king of motion;

To the plunging winds above

You are momentary indecision.

Aimless petal of the wind,

Waver carelessly against this June.

The universe, like you, is but

The drowsy arm of stillness

Spinning gently weird circles in his sleep.

ADVICE TO A POOL

Be a liquid threshold for the dawn

And let night touch you with his back.

The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds

Are only pause and rhythm

Within an endless fantasy,

But you, like they, can be

A dream from the loins of a dream,

And build a golden stairway of escape.

O coolly unperturbed pool,

Slap your ripples in laughter at men,

Who splash you with their lordly hands.

Time is but a phantom dagger

That motion lifts to slay itself.

WHEN FOOLS DISPUTE

A trickle of dawn insinuated itself

Through the crevices of black satiation.

The elderly trees coughed, lightly, hurriedly,

In remonstrance against the invasion.

Lean with a virginal poison,

The grass-blades shook, immune to light and time.

A bird lost in a tree

Shrilly flirted with its energy....

One fool, in the garden, spoke to another.

ADVICE TO A GRASS-BLADE

Thin and dark green symbol

Of an earth forever raising

Myriads of chained wings,

Breezes have a form, to you,

And sounds break into vivid shape.

The proud finality of tiny sight

Cannot lure your pliant blindness.

Thin and dark green blade,

Be not awed by trees and men

Whose sound is all that gives them life.

You reach the sky because your face

Is not turned toward it.

EAST-SIDE: NEW YORK

An old Jew munches an apple,

With conquering immersion

All the thwarted longings of his life

Urge on his determined teeth.

His face is hard and pear-shaped;

His eyes are muddy capitulations;

But his mouth is incongruous.

Softly, slightly distended,

Like that of a whistling girl,

It is ingenuously haunting

And makes the rest of him a soiled, grey background.

Hopes that lie within their grave

Of submissive sternness,

Have spilled their troubled ghosts upon this mouth,

And a tortured belief

Has dwindled into tenderness upon it....

He trudges off behind his push-cart

And the Ghetto walks away with him.

TO A MAN

Master of earnest equilibrium,

You are a Christ made delicate

By centuries of baffled meditation.

You curve an old myth to a peaceful sword,

Like some sleep-walker challenging

The dream that gave him shape.

With gentle, antique insistence

You place your child’s hand on the universe

And trace a smile of love within its depths.

And yet, the whirling scarecrow men have made

Of something that eludes their sight,

May have the startling simplicity of your smile.

Once every thousand years

Stillness fades into a shape

That men may crucify.

THE CHILD MEDITATES

The oak-tree in front of my house

Smells different every morning.

Sometimes it smells fresh and wise

Like my mother’s hair.

Sometimes it stands ashamed

Because it doesn’t own the smell

It borrowed from our flower-garden.

Sometimes it has a windy smell,

As though it had come back from a long walk.

The oak-tree in front of my house

Has different smells, like grown up people.

My doll hides behind her pink cheeks,

So that you can’t see when she moves,

But it doesn’t matter because

She always moves when no one is looking,

And that is why people think she is still.

People laugh when I say that my doll is alive,

But if she were dead, my fingers

Wouldn’t know that they were touching her.

She lives inside a little house.

And laughs because I cannot find the door.

The colours in my room

Meet each other and hesitate.

Is that what people call shape?

Nobody seems to think so,

But I believe that lines are dead shapes

Unless they fall against each other

And look surprised, like the colours in my room!

PIERROT OBJECTS

They have made me an airy apology

For the crude insistence of their flesh!

They have made me twist my tongue

Into fickle nonchalance!

With a languid impudence

I have tarried underneath the moon,

While the haggard reticence

Of their lives forgot itself within me!

Well, I am rebelling

At the men who make me

Their grimacing marionnette!

Let them find another dancing-teacher

For their dull, unruffled fears.

I am off to tear my black and white

Into shreds, within a valley

Where nakedness and colours do not need

An artificial night to make them brave!

COLUMBINE REFLECTS

They have moulded my face with a tear and a sneer.

They have sandalled me with caprice,

And the heart they have given me

Is a bag of red tissue-paper.

Their loves are ragged and fat

And seek the consolation

Of a tinkling effigy!

But even an effigy may wink

An eye at its slinking masters!

I can laugh at their frantic, tattered arms

Spinning me into impish posturings,

And jeer at the faces behind me!

After my play I go to sleep,

But they must sit, heavily looking at each other.

RATTLE-SNAKE MOUNTAIN DIALOGUE

Rattle-Snake Mountain

Every night the sky grips my shoulder, in pain.

The cows upon my slope

Attack their blades of grass with less decision.

The boulders reaching in to form my ribs,

Are touched by evening dizziness, to dust,

And lose their fierce pretence of hardness.

Three crows in a row

Search for clearer tongues, with steady discords.

Man

The nervous dissolution

Which men call beauty stands

Sternly watching itself.

Rattle-Snake Mountain

Evening, staggering under dead men’s tongues,

Makes light of my loneliness.

He comes like a madman dissolved

Into unbearable quietness.

But, drinking my vigorous muteness,

He melts into that stream of seeking motion

Which men call morning.

Man

You teach him to make his recompense

A solitary unfolding

Walking perilously

Between the scowls of life and death.

Rattle-Snake Mountain

When he goes he is something more than himself.

He holds a lean alertness

That, green as any leaf,

Takes the flutterings of life, unperturbed.

Man

Beauty is a proud stare

Challenging all things to remove

Their inattentive clamours:

And some things bow abruptly,

Timidly stroking their untouched skins.

Rattle-Snake Mountain

And thus evening bows into morning.

DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PAST AND PRESENT POET

Past Poet

I wrote of roses on a woman’s breast,

Glowing as though her blood

Had welled out to a spellbound fierceness;

And the glad, light mixture of her hair.

I wrote of God and angels.

They stole the simple blush of my desire

To make their isolated triumph human.

Knights and kings flooded my song,

Catching with their glittering clash

The unheard boldness in my life.

Gods and nymphs slipped through my voice,

And with the lofty scurrying of their feet

Spurned the smirched angers of my days.

Present Poet

You raised an unhurried, church-like escape.

You lingered in shimmering idleness;

Or lengthened a prayer into a lance;

Or strengthened a thought till it heaved off all of life

And dropped its sightless heaven into your smile.

Life, to us, is a colourless tangle.

Like madly gorgeous weavers

Our eyes reiterate themselves on life.

Past Poet

My towering simplicity

Loosening an evening of belief

Over the things it dared not view,

Gladly shunned reality

Just as your mad weaver does.

Present Poet

Reality is a formless lure,

And only when we know this

Do we dare to be unreal.

SMILES

Smiles are the words beyond the words

That thoughts abandon helplessly.

Upon this nervous shop-girl’s face,

Where clusters of tiny limpness meet,

A frightened spark leaps high and drops

Into the hot pause of a banished love.

A lustrelessly plump

Girl beside her does not know

That her face for moments glows

Into a helpless solitude.

Upon an old man’s face

Are gleams of meek embarrassment—

The faded presence of some old debt?

This woman’s face is scorched

By a torch that falls from weary hands

And makes her laugh an unheard lie.

The face of this tamed sprite

Shimmers with an understanding

Of the opaque loss she cannot bear,

And I see that smiles are sometimes

Words beyond the words

That thoughts abandon hopefully.

THE COURTESAN CHATS

Last night I met a passive man

With almost no curve to his face,

And skin relentlessly white.

He made me tell his fortune

With a pack of cards.

“Jack of hearts—your love will be

A scullion overturning trays of food

And standing dubiously in their midst.”

“Queen of diamonds—you will have a wife

Like a thistle dipped in frost,

Helpless in your sheathed hands.”

“Deuce of clubs—a downcast jester

Will pester you with slanting malice

When you seek to play the king.”

“Ace of hearts—your life will stand

Straight in a desperate majesty,

Its lurid robes ever slipping

And one wound endlessly dripping.”

The passive man blew out a candle

On the table and bade me leave,

Not desiring me to see his face.

THE MOUNTEBANK CRITICIZES

I lose all sense of profiles,

Strolling through your greys and blacks and browns!

No man bestows his orange robe

Soberly upon your uncoloured pavements,

Rebuking life for being death.

No woman taunts her sorrows

With a coloured haughtiness.

When you take to colours, you are ashamed,

Like pages nibbling at a pilfered tart.

You go back quickly to your coldness.

And since you have no colours on your clothes,

You walk in straight and measured lilts

As befits the seriously blind.

Your women do not stroll as though

Each step were a timid intrigue

Woven into the climax to which they fare.

Pistols, rhapsodies and heavy odours

Drugged the lustre of my time.

Yet, we had a virtue.

We lavished colours on our backs

And ravished our sorrow with brightness

That often gave a lightness to our feet!

TO LI T’AI PO

They are writing poems to you:

White devils who have not

Smeared the distant yellow of your life

Upon their skins.

Faces where snob and harlequin

Ogle each other in two, cold colours,

White and red;

Faces where middle age

Sits, tearing a last gardenia;

Faces continually cracked

By the brittle larceny of age;

Faces where emotions

Stand disarmed within a calm mirage:

These faces bend over paper

And steal from you a little silver and red

So that their lives may seem to bleed

Under the prick of a flashing need.

The old and tired smile

Of one who spies too much within himself

To spare the effort of a halting frown,

Brushed its sceptre over your face.

You gave kind eyes to your hope,

Desiring it to grope unfearing

Underneath the toppling mountain-tops.

The wine you drank was a lake

In which you splashed and found a vigour;

The wine you drank was void of taste.

Your yellow skin resembled

A balanced docility

Smiling at all things—even at itself—

Li T’ai Po.

INSANITY

Like a vivid hyperbole,

The sun plunged into April’s freshness,

And struck its sparkling madness

Against the barnlike dejection

Of this dark red insane asylum.

A softly clutching noise

Stumbled from the open windows.

Now and then obliquely reeling shrieks

Rose, as though from men

To whom death had assumed

An inexpressibly kindly face.

A man stood at one window,

His gaunt face trembling underneath

A feverish jauntiness.

A long white feather slanted back

Upon his almost shapeless hat,

Like an innocent evasion.

Hotly incessant, his voice

Methodically flogged the April air:

A voice that held the clashing bones

Of happiness and fear;

A voice in which emotion

Sharply ridiculed itself;

A monstrously vigorous voice

Mockingly tearing at life

With an unanswerable question.

Hollowed out by his howl,

I turned and saw an asylum guard.

His petulantly flabby face

Rolled into deathlike chips of eyes.

He bore the aimless confidence

Of one contentedly playing with other men’s wings.

He walked away; the man above still shrieked.

I could not separate them.

TRACK-WORKERS

The rails you carry cut into your hands,

Like the sharp lips of an unsought lover.

As you stumble over the ties

Sunlight is clinging, yellow spit

Raining down upon your faces.

You are the living cuspidors of day.

Dirt, its teasing ghost, dust,

And passionless kicks of steel, fill you.

Flowers sprouting near the tracks,

Brush their lightly odoured hands

In vain against your stale jackets of sweat.

Within you, minds and hearts

Are snoring to the curt rhythm of your breath.

You do not see this blustering blackbird

Promenading on a barbed-wire fence.

He eyes you with spritelike hauteur,

Unable to understand

Why your motions endlessly copy each other,

One of you, a meek and burly Pole,

Peers a moment at the strutting blackbird

With a fleeting shade of dull resentment....

There is always one among you

Who recoils from glimpsing corpses.

FIGURE

Through the turbulent servility

Of a churlish city street

He strides opaquely; nothing in his walk

Resembles an advancing gleam.

His legs are muffled iron

Stubbornly following even thoughts,

His gaily pugnacious head

Seems worried because no dread

Remains for it to slay.

His eyes hold an austerity

That recalls itself while leaping,

And often melts into amusement.

The bent poise of his body

Tells of walls that threw him back,

Only to crumble underneath

The stunned friendliness of his face.

Through the angularly churlish street

He walks, and stoops beneath the captured weight

Of eyes that do not see him.

NEGROES

The loose eyes of an old man

Shone aloof upon his boyish face;

And a sluggish innocence

Hugged his dull brown skin.

He sang a hymn caught from his elders

And his voice resembled

A quavering, feverish laugh

Softened in a swaying cradle.

His life had found a refuge in his voice,

And the rest of him was sickly flesh

Ignorant of life and death.

Like a crushed, excited clown

His mother shuffled out upon the porch.

Slowly her dark brown face resolved

Into the hushed and sulky look

Of one who stands within a dim-walled trap.

Lazily uncertain,

She raised the boy into her arms.

Then her voice swung in the air

Like a quavering, feverish laugh

Softened in a swaying cradle.

BROADWAY

With sardonic futility

The multi-coloured crowd,

Hurried by fervent sensuality,

Flees from something carried on its back.

Endlessly subdued, a sound

Pours up from the crowd,

Like some one ever gasping for breath

To utter releasing words.

Through the artificial valley

Made by gaudy evasions,

The stifled crowd files up and down,

Stabbing thought with rapid noises.

Women strutting dulcetly,

Embroider their unappeased hungers,

And men stumble toward a flitting opiate.

Sometimes a moment breaks apart

And one can hear the knuckles

Of children rapping on towering doors:

Rapping on the highway

Where civilization parades

Its frozen amiabilities!

FIFTH AVENUE
(New York)

Seasons bring nothing to this gulch

Save a harshly intimate anecdote

Scrawled, here and there, on paint and stone.

The houses shoulder each other

In a forced and passionless communion.

Their harassed angles rise

Like a violent picture-puzzle

Hiding a story that only ruins could reveal;

Their straight lines, robbed of power,

Meet in dwarfed rebellion.

Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces

Suffering ants to crawl

In and out of their gaping mouths.

Sometimes, in menial attitudes

They stand like Gothic platitudes

Slipshodly carved in dark brown stone.

Tarnished solemnities of death

Cast their transfigured hue on this avenue.

The cool and indiscriminate glare

Of sunlight seems to desecrate a tomb,

And the racing people seem

A stream of accidental shadows.

Hard noises strike one’s face and make

It numb with momentary reality,

But the noiseless undertone returns

And they change to unreal jests

Made by death.

YOUNG WOMAN

So we have a face

Cupped by tender insolences,

Half repenting insolences

Teasing their own angers.

Then, a tense exuberance

Brushes them away

And burns a humbly erect

Queen upon her face.

This happens in the space

Between a frown and indecision.

Her face becomes forlornly wild,

And a beggarly impatience

Hovers into furtive shame.

All the supplely intricate flame

Vanishes, and leaves no mark.

Her eyes are violently dark

With a hopeless waiting;

Her lips are isolated tatters—

All that is left of shattered recreating.

Then, as quickly as she fled,

The humble queen returns.

Staring and unappeased

She eyes her crumpled hands.

TWO WOMEN ON A STREET

This street is callous apathy

In a scale of greys and browns.

Its black roof-line suggests

Flat bodies unable to rise.

Even its screams are listlessness

Having an evil dream.

Its air is swarthy rawness

Troubled with ash cans and cellars.

An old woman ambles on

With a black bag that seems part of her back,

And a candidly hawk-like face.

She croons a smothered lullaby

That sifts a flitting roundness

Into her sharply parted face.

Then she surrenders her hand

To the welter of a garbage can.

A hugely wilted woman slinks by

With a cracked stare on her face.

Her eyes are beaten discs

Of the lamplight’s ghastly keenness.

She glides away as though the night

Were a lover flogging her;

Glides into the callous apathy

Of this street, like one who cringes

Happily into her lover’s hallway.

ADVICE TO MAPLE-TREES

O little maple-trees,

Slender and unkempt, looking with shaggy askance

Upon the moon-spiked solitude;

O little maple-trees,

Growing a little toward the sky

That touches you to all eyes save your own,

You rattle insistently for wings,

But wings could never tear

The stain of earth from your feet:

The earth that gnaws at you until

Your wing-cries strike the autumn night.

You see, with me, this crescent moon

Juggled on the tawny fingertip

Of a running cloud.

The touch of your desire, or its fall,

Would but be symbols of an equal death.

BOARDING-HOUSE EPISODE

Apples race into appetites:

The unswerving mechanism of the table

Hurries through the last dish of supper.

Then an undulating interlude

From people who have spent one pleasure,

Distractedly juggling its aftermath

And peering at new desires.

One woman gazes at another

While twitching murder shimmers in her eyes

And skims across her face.

Violets in a madman’s scene,

Suspended in the air,

Are the eyes of her neighbour.

And in between them sits the nervous man

With face like pouting gargoyle,

Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot say:

Explosive evasions;

Fears too tired to shriek;

Renunciations groaning from their dungeons.

He eyes each woman, like a man

Solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice.

Crisp inanities ripple back and forth

Among these three, like ghostly parrots

Visiting each other’s cages.

She with crazy, violet eyes,

Plays with her fork, as though its clink

Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts;

She with murder in her eyes,

And curtly voluminous body,

Evenly plays her child-rôle.

Cringing on the rim of middle age,

With broken shields piled at her feet,

She has made this man a haunted palace

And she stands before the door

She dare not open, with a dagger

For the woman standing at her side.

They sit, afterwards, upon the veranda,

Meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening:

Woman with twisted, violet eyes,

Woman with hidden murder on her lips,

And man like a pouting gargoyle.

Then, like tired children,

Their words grow cool and lazy.

They draw closer to each other

And, with a trembling curiosity,

Look at each other’s hands.

VAUDEVILLE MOMENT

They have carved a battle

Across your hard face:

Transfigured conflict,

Lines like suspended lances.

Your voice must be the uneven

Clink of the last carver’s chisel.

Your soul must be a pious subterfuge

Squinting its admiring eyes

At the lifeless battle lining your face....

Middle aged vaudeville conductor,

With a hunted leanness on your body,

Sometimes the swing of your baton

Sways with a brooding patience

That violates your ended face.

Two acrobats appear,

With their automaton bows.

Their unlit motion does not strike

The air into a hugging flame.

They are blue and orange corpses

Whirled in a sacrilegious festival.

They vividly resemble

The chiseled battle that grips

This lean conductor’s face:

Motion without life,

And life that holds no motion!

TO ORRICK JOHNS

The tread-mill roar that ever tramps between

The smirched geometries of this stern place,

Sweeps vainly on your drowsily reckless face

Lost in a swirl of raped loves barely seen.

Sometimes your keenly pagan lips are raised

By thoughts too tense to shape themselves in speech:

Still, wounded thoughts that silently beseech

Your life to make them impotent and dazed.

O tangled and half-strangled child, you shrink

For ever from yourself, and wear a pose

Of nimble and impenetrable pride.

Yet sometimes, wavering on the sudden brink

Of jaded bitterness, you drop your clothes

And weave a prayer into your naked stride.

YOUNG POET

The grinning clamour on your face

Dies abruptly, for moments:

Boldness and timidity

Are swept, transfigured, against each other.

But the glistening turmoil

Once more spurns itself with jests

That light its troubled hands.

When too much pain has lowered

The eyelids of your mood,

A peaceful humour wraps your face.

You are like an old man

Watching children fly from his fingertips.

In your kirtle of borrowed skies

You find a sorrow luring your horizons

Into hesitating brightness....

When night remembers, you have straightened

Into stealthy, angry calmness

Fingering it first, unsent arrow.

STEEL-MILLS: SOUTH CHICAGO

I

This red hush toppling over the sky,

Wanders one step toward the stars

And dies in a questioning shiver.

The steel-mill chimneys fling their gaunt seeking

A little distance into the red

That softly combs their smoky hair.

The steel-mill chimneys only live at night

When crimson light makes love to them

And star-light trickles through the red,

Like glimpses of some far-off fairy tale.

Throughout the day the steel-mill chimneys stand

Rigidly within the wind-whirled glare:

Only night can bring them supple straightness.

II

From the little, brown gate that does not see them

Because its eyes are blind with wooing soot,

An endless stream of men scatters out

Into the cool bewilderment of morning.

Upon their lips a limply child-like surrender

Curves out to the light, as though they felt

The presence of an unassuming strangeness.

The morning hides from their eyes:

They walk on, in great strides,

Like blind men swinging over a well-known scene.

Their faces twitch with echoes of iron fists:

Their faces hold a swarthy stupor

Loosened by little fingers of morning light

Until it droops into reluctant life.

And then their eyes, made flat by night,

Swell into a Madonna-like surprise

At children trooping back in huge disguise.

The oranges in lunch-room windows change

To sleek suns dipped in sleepy light,

And rounded tarts in china plates

Are like red heart-beats, resting but not dead.

A trolley-car speeds by

And seems a strident lyric of motion.

Wagons rumble down the street

Like drums enticing weariness to step....

The hearts of these steel-striding men

Ascend and blend within their eyes,

And yet, these men are unaware of this.

They only feel a fluid relief

Voicing, in a clustered roar,

The cries of struggling thoughts unshaped by words.

But there are some who break forth from the rest.

This old Hungarian strides along

And binds naïvely-winged prayer-sandals

Upon the heavy feet of shuffling loves.

Gently, he plays with his beard

As though his fingers touched a woman’s hair.

And this young Slav whose surly blasphemy

Curls his face into a simple hate,

Has taken iron into his laugh

And uses it to hew his stony mind.

While this Italian whose deep olive skin

Shines like sunlight groping through dense leaves,

Forgets his battered happiness

And bows with mock grace to his shouting day.

Beside him is a fellow-countryman

Walking aimless, dazed with joy of motion.

Upon his face a glistening vacancy

Lights the mildly querying thoughts

That seek each other but never meet.

Behind him steps a stalwart Pole

Whose rhythmic, stately insolence

Turns the sidewalk into a grey carpet,

Grey as the shades that race across his face

And show the savage squalor of his soul.

Night has broken her heart upon him,

Only scarring his bitter smile.

A street of little, jack-o’-lantern houses

Veering into leering saloons,

Where the night, a crazy child,

Dips herself in sallow rouge

And chases oaths and heavy mirth

And even human beings:

Where the smoky sadness of the steel-mills

Wanders hesitantly into death

And drops a ghostly blur upon this girl.

Her numbly waxen, cherub face

Emerges gently from the doorway’s blackness

As though the dark had given birth to it.

And then the falling light reveals

That something of a village hangs about her:

Something slumbering and ample.

The doorway is too small to hold

Her shoulders that are like a hill’s broad curves

Dwindled in the distance....

She is one of many earth-curved girls

Who listened to the insistent tinkle

Of wind-winged music from a far-off land:

Listened and knew not

That their own hearts faintly played.

So she ran to this far phantom,

Only finding it within herself

When the city’s sly fists rained upon it.

Then once more she fled

With a dead heart whose restless pallor

Crept to squalid wantonness, for refuge.

And now she stands within this doorway,

Uttering muffled innuendoes

To the drained men of her race.

Yet, something of a village hangs about her:

Something slumbering and ample

Stealing from the earth curves of her shoulders.

III

The steel-mill workers straggle down this street,

Clanging shut the doorways of their souls,

And the sound rips their lips open.

The steel-mill workers do not know of this:

They only seek something that will sweeten

The dirt that has eaten into their flesh

And change it to raw music.

They straggle down this street,

Their faces slack and oiled with amorousness.

Like cats they play with their desires,

Biting them with little laughs

Until the sallow houses draw them in.

And then the night pursues their revelry:

Echoes from the shut doors of their souls.

IV

Three bent women and a child

Stoop before the steel-mill gate

As though the morning’s ghastly murmur

Washed against them in a wave

Stiffening them into resisting curves.

One is old and floridly misshapen.

Years have melted out within her frame,

Flooding her with lukewarm loves.

The wrinkles on her flabby face

Are like a faded scrawl of pain

Scattered by the flesh on which it rests.

Her frayed shawl hanging unaware of her

Is a symbol of her heart.

The woman standing at her side

Is tall and like a slanting scarecrow

Coldly jerking in the morning’s glare.

Only when she lifts a bony hand

Tapping life against her face,

Does the image disappear.

Dead dreams dangle in her heart,

Limply hanging from their rainbow sashes,

And whenever one sash trembles,

Then, she lifts a gnarled hand to her face

And tastes a moment of departing life.

Near her stands a slimly rigid woman

With an iron fear upon her bones.

A worn strait-jacket of lines

Cuts the dying youth upon her face.

The slender child beside her,

Buried within staidly murky clothes,

Glances frightenedly up at her mother:

Glances as one who dances to a gate

And fumbles for a latch that hides itself.

Then from the rusty-reveried steel-mill gate

An endless stream of men scatter out

Into the cool bewilderment of morning.

Upon their lips a limply child-like surrender

Curves out to the light, as though they felt

The presence of an unassuming strangeness.

SOUTH STATE STREET: CHICAGO

I

Rows of blankly box-like buildings

Raise their sodden architecture

Into the poised lyric of the sky.

At their feet, pawn-shops and burlesque theatres

Yawn beneath their livid confetti.

In the pawn-shop windows, violins,

Cut-glass bowls and satchels mildly blink

Upon the mottled turbulence outside,

And sit with that detached assurance

Gripping things inanimate.

Near them, slyly shaded cabarets

Stand in bland and ornate sleep,

And the glassy luridness

Of penny-arcades flays the eyes.

The black crowd clatters like an idiot’s wrath.

II

Wander with me down this street

Where the spectral night is caught

Like moon-paint on a colourless lane....

On this corner stands a woman

Sleekly, sulkily complacent

Like a tigress nibbling bits of sugar.

At her side, a brawny, white-faced man

Whose fingers waltz upon his checkered suit,

Searches for one face amidst the crowd.

(His smile is like a rambling sword.)

His elbows almost touch a snowy girl

Whose body blooms with cool withdrawal.

From her little nook of peaceful scorn

She casts unseeing eyes upon the crowd.

Near her stands a weary newsboy

With a sullenly elfin face.

The night has leaned too intimately

On the frightened scampering of his soul.

But to this old, staidly patient woman

With her softly wintry eyes,

Night bends down in gentle revelation

Undisturbed by joy or hatred.

At her side two factory girls

In slyly jaunty hats and swaggering coats,

Weave a twinkling summer with their words:

A summer where the night parades

Rakishly, and like a gold Beau Brummel.

With a gnome-like impudence

They thrust their little, pink tongues out

At men who sidle past.

To them, the frantic dinginess of day

Has melted to caressing restlessness

Tingling with the pride of breasts and hips.

At their side two dainty, languid girls

Playing with their suavely tangled dresses,

Touch the black crowd with unsearching eyes.

But the old man on the corner,

Bending over his cane like some tired warrior

Resting on a sword, peers at the crowd

With the smouldering disdain

Of a King whipped out of his domain.

For a moment he smiles uncertainly.

Then wears a look of frail sternness.

Musty, Rabelaisian odours stray

From this naïvely gilded family-entrance

And make the body of a vagrant

Quiver as though unseen roses grazed him.

His face is blackly stubbled emptiness

Swerving to the rotted prayers of eyes.

Yet, sometimes his thin arm leaps out

And hangs a moment in the air,

As though he raised a violin of hate

And lacked the strength to play it.

A woman lurches from the family-entrance.

With tense solicitude she hugs

Her can of beer against her stunted bosom

And mumbles to herself.

The trampled blasphemy upon her face

Holds up, in death, its watery, barren eyes.

Indifferently, she brushes past the vagrant:

Life has peeled away her sense of touch.

III

With groping majesty, the endless crowd

Pounds its searching chant of feet

Down this tawdrily resplendent street.

People stray into a burlesque theatre

Framed with scarlet, blankly rotund girls.

Here a burly cattle-raiser walks

With the grace of wind-swept prairie grass.

Behind him steps a slender clerk

Tendering his sprightly stridency

To the stolid, doll-like girl beside him.

At his side a heavy youth

Dully stands beneath his swaggering mask;

And a smiling man in black and white

Walks, like some Pierrot grown middle-aged.

Mutely twinkling fragments of a romance:

Tiny lights stand over this cabaret.

Men and women jovially emboldened

Stroll beneath the curtained entrance,

And their laughs, like softly brazen cow-bells,

Change the scene to a strange Pastoral.

Hectic shepherdesses drunk with night,

Women mingle their coquettish colours....

Suddenly, a man leaps out

From the doorway’s blazing pallor,

Smashing into the drab sidewalk.

His drunken lips and eyelids break apart

Like a clown in sudden suicide.

Then the mottled nakedness

Of the scene comes, like a blow.

Stoically crushed in hovering grey

Night lies coldly on this street.

Momentary sounds crash into night

Like ghostly curses stifled in their birth....

And over all the blankly box-like buildings

Raise their sodden architecture

Into the poised lyric of the sky.

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:

The cover image for this eBook was created by the transcriber and is entered into the public domain.

Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been retained.