INTRODUCING
IRONY

INTRODUCING
IRONY

A BOOK OF POETIC SHORT
STORIES AND POEMS

BY
MAXWELL BODENHEIM

NEW YORK
BONI AND LIVERIGHT
1922

Copyright, 1922, by
Boni & Liveright, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America

To
FEDYA RAMSAY
WHOSE HAND NEVER LEAVES MY SHOULDER

Some of the poems and stories in this book have appeared in The Dial, Harper’s Bazaar, The Little Review, The Nation, Cartoons Magazine, Poetry, A Magazine of Verse, The New York Globe, The Bookman, Vanity Fair, The Measure and The Double Dealer

CONTENTS

INTRODUCING
IRONY

JACK ROSE

WITH crafty brooding life turned to Jack Rose

And made him heroin-peddler, and his pose

Was sullenly reflective since he feared

That life, regarding him, had merely jeered.

His vanity was small and could not call

His egoism to the dubious hall

Of fame, where average artists spend their hour.

Doubting his powers he was forced to cower

Within the shrill, damp alleys of his time,

Immersed in that brisk midnight known as crime.

He shunned the fiercely shrewd stuff that he sold

To other people, and derived a cold

Enjoyment from the writhing of their hearts.

A speechless artist, he admired the arts

Of blundering destruction, like a monk

Viewing a play that made him mildly drunk.

And so malicious and ascetic Jack

Bent to his trade with a relentless back

Until he tapped an unexpected smile—

A woman’s smile as smooth and hard as tile.

May Bulger pawned her flesh to him and gave

His heroin to her brother, with a grave

Reluctance fumbling at her painted lips.

Though angry at herself, she took the whips

Of undesired love, to quiet a boy

Who wept inanely for his favorite toy.

She hated Jack because he failed to gloss

And soften the rough surface of her loss,

His matter-of-fact frown biting at her heart.

He hated her because her smiling guess

Had robbed him of ascetic loneliness,

And when her brother died, Jack sat beside

Her grief and played a mouth-harp while she cried.

But when she raised her head and smiled at him—

A smile intensely stripped and subtly grim—

His hate felt overawed and in a trap,

And suddenly his head fell to her lap.

For some time she sat stiffly in the chair,

Then slowly raised her hand and stroked his hair.

SEAWEED FROM MARS

I

“HAVE you ever played on a violin

Larger than ten thousand stars

And warmer than what you call sin?”

Torban, a young man from Mars,

Gave me the stretch of his voice,

And my “no” fell down like a pin

On the echoed din of his words.

He said: “Then I have no choice.

I must use the barrenly involved

Words with which you have not solved

The wistful riddles of your days.

Leave the pale and ruddy herds

Of men, with their surrendering ways,

And come with me to Mars.”

II

DRUMS of Autumn beat on Mars,

Calling our minds to reunion.

The avenues of seaweed spars

Have attained a paleness

Equal to that of earthly philosophies,

And the trees have lost

The diamond violence of Spring.

Their purple leaves have turned to grey

Just as a human religion

Gradually changes to pretence.

In Mars we have only two seasons,

Spring and Autumn—their reasons

Rest in a treacherous sun

That suddenly runs away,

Creating a twilight-suspense.

When the sun reappears

Mars is once more amazed

By the blazing flatteries of Spring.

Again the heavy leaves ring

With odor and light deftly pressed

Into a stormy chorus.

Then we abandon the screaming violins

Of our minds, and each man wins

An understanding rest.

Once more we roam and jest

Upon the avenues, with voices

One shade louder than the leaves,

Or sail upon the choral seas

And trade our words with molten ease.

Throughout the Autumn we stand

Still and deserted, while our minds

Leap into sweeping tensions

Blending sound and form

Into one search across the universe.

III

WHAT do we find in this search?

All of your earthly words lurch

Feebly upon the outskirts of my mind,

And when they pass beyond them, they are blind.

Outward forms are but the graves

Of sound, and all the different waves

Of light and odor, they are sound

That floats unshaped and loosely gowned.

When sound is broken into parts

Your ears receive the smaller arts,

But when it drifts in broad release

You cannot hear its louder peace.

Your houses, hills, and flesh of red

Are shapes of sound, asleep or dead.

In Mars a stronger Spring of sound

Revives our forms and makes Profound

Music, softer than the dins

That rose from Autumn violins.

Our minds, whose tense excursions spread

In chase of noisy walls that fled,

Relent and drop within our heads,

Enjoying the timid sound of their beds.

Filled with a gracious weariness,

We place it, like a lighter dress,

Upon the sounds from other stars

Brought back to celebrate on Mars.

IV

A GIRL of Mars is burning

Notes of thought within her throat.

Her pale white lips are turning

The fire to storied chords.

The song is old but often made

By girls who sit in Spring and braid

The lanterned language of their hair.

Its spacious gaiety cannot be sold

To your narrow glow of words.

The hint that I shall give is cold

And like the sound of snowy air.

I shall journey with the men

When my curling thoughts are ten.

O the sternness of that number!

Colored sounds from breath to umber

Promising a first release.

I have dwelt too long in peace

Placing smallness on my breast.

The prisoned whisper of my skin

Longs to vanish in the din

Of Autumn when great sounds are caught.

Let the tall wildness of my thought

Stride beside the thundering grace

Of the man whose spring-time face

Brought me tiny notes of rest.

She sits within a house of stone

That lends a wise and balanced tone:

A roofless house whose walls are low

And level with her head’s grey glow.

The bright sounds of her parents fly

Around the house—we do not die

In Mars, but change to gleams of sounds

And stay within our gayer rounds

Until when tired Spring has gone

We lead the Autumn searchers on.

Before we change, our bodies curve

Like yours save that our skins are gray:

Light shades of gray that almost swerve

To white, like earthly men who pray.

V

WE do not love and hate in Mars.

These earthly cries are flashing bars

Of sound from which our minds are free.

They stand in our mythology:

Legends elusive and weird,

Acrid Gods that once were feared.

They vanished imperceptibly

And none among us can agree

Upon the tangled way in which they fled.

Starlit symbols of dread,

They slowly exhausted themselves and died

In striding heralds of a wilder bride.

We have no emotions in Mars.

They are like long-healed wounds

Whose scars are softened by the gleam of our minds.

We approach them with clearer kinds

Of sound from deeply resting thought.

Our youths and maidens have not caught

The treacherous and tightly bound

Confusion of your loving sound,

For sex to us is but the ring

Of different shades of thought in Spring

When men recline upon the breast

Of women, dissolving into thoughtful rest.

In Autumn sex is left behind.

Men and women no longer lined

By different bodies raise their dins

Above the screaming violins.

TURMOIL IN A MORGUE

NEGRO,

Chinaman,

White servant-girl,

Russian woman,

Are learning how to be dead,

Aided by the impersonal boredom

Of a morgue at evening.

The morgue divides its whole

Of dead mens’ contacts into four

Parts, and places one in each

Of these four bodies waiting for the carts.

The frankness of their decay

Breaks into contradictory symbols

And sits erect upon the wooden tables,

Thus cancelling the validity of time.

In a voice as passive as slime

The negro speaks.

“Killed a woman: ripped her skin.

Saw her heart floating in a tumbler of gin.

Had to drink her heart because it wouldn’t leave the gin.

Because I wanted to reach all of her

They ripped my flesh.

They wanted to reach all of me

And their excuse was better than mine.”

Cowed baby painted black,

The negro sits upon fundamentals

And troubles them a little with his hands.

The beautiful insanity

Of his eyes rebukes

The common void of his face.

Then the Chinaman speaks

In a voice whose tones are brass

From which emotion has been extracted.

“Loved a woman: she was white.

Her man blew my brains out into the night.

Hatred is afraid of color.

Color is the holiday

Given to moods of understanding:

Hatred does not understand.

When stillness ends the fever of ideas

Hatred will be a scarcely remembered spark.”

Manikin at peace

With the matchless deceit of a planet,

The Chinaman fashions his placid immensity.

The Chinaman chides his insignificance

With a more impressive rapture

Than that of western midgets.

His rapture provides an excellent light

For the silhouette of the negro’s curse.

Then the white servant-girl

Speaks in a voice whose syllables

Fall like dripping flower-juice and offal,

Both producing a similar sound.

“I made a neat rug for a man.

He cleaned his feet on me and I liked

The tired, scheming way in which he did it.

When he finished he decided

That he needed a smoother texture,

And found another lady.

I killed myself because I couldn’t rub out

The cunning marks that he left behind.”

Impulsive doll made of rubbish

On which a spark descended and ended,

The white servant-girl, without question or answer,

Accepts the jest of a universe.

Then the Russian woman

Speaks in a voice that is heat

Ill-at-ease upon its couch of sound.

“I married a man because

His lips tormented my melancholy

And made it long to be meek,

And because, when he walked to his office each morning,

He thought himself a kindled devil

Enduring the smaller figures around him.

He abandoned me for German intrigue

And I chased him in other men,

Never quite designing him.

Death, a better megalomaniac,

Relieved me of the pursuit.”

Symbol of earth delighted

With the vibration of its nerves,

The Russian woman sunders life

Into amusing deities of emotion

And bestows a hurried worship.

Then the morgue, attended by a whim,

Slays the intonations of their trance

And slips these people back to life.

The air is cut by transformation.

The white servant-girl retreats to a corner

With a shriek, while the negro advances,

And the Russian woman

Nervously objects to the Chinaman’s question.

The morgue, weary housewife for speechless decay,

Spends its helplessness in gay revenge:

Revenge of earth upon four manikins

Who straightened up on wooden tables

And betrayed her.

CONDENSED NOVEL

SHUN the abundant paragraphs

With which a novelist interviews shades

Of physical appearance in one man,

And regard the body of Alvin Spar

Curtained by more aristocratic words.

“Alvin Spar in adolescence

Was neither slim nor rotund,

But slightly aware of future corpulence.

The face that Aristotle may have had

Was interfering, bit by bit,

With an outer face of pouting curves.

Alvin Spar in youth

Held half of the face that Aristotle

May have had, and the pungent directness

Of a stable-boy.

Alvin Spar in middle age

Had the face that Aristotle

May have had—a large austerity

Disputing the bloom of well-selected emotions.

Straight nose, thick lips, low forehead

Were apprentices to the austerity

That often stepped beyond them.

Alvin Spar in old age

Had drawn the wrinkled bed-quilts

Over the face that Aristotle

May have had, but his eyes peered out,

Fighting with sleep.”

Shuffle the cards on which I have written

Alvin Spar’s changes in physical appearance,

And deal them out to the various players.

Accident first, then the qualities of the players—

These two will struggle to dominate

The movements of the plot.

The plot of this novel will ascend

In twenty lines and escape

The honoured adulteration so dear to men.

“Alvin Spar loved a woman

Who poured acid on his slumber

By showing him the different fools within him.

Sincerely longing for wisdom

He married her, while she desired

A pupil whom she could lazily beat.

She convinced him that emotions

Were simply periods of indecision

Within the mind, and with emphasis

He walked to another woman.

The second woman loved him,

But she was merely to him

Clay for mental sculpture.

She killed herself, believing

That he might become to her in death

A figure less remote and careful.

He forgot her in an hour

And used the rest of his life

In finding women over whom he could tower....

He died while madly straying over his heights.”

The incidental people, chatter, and background?

You will find them between

Pages one and four-hundred

Of the latest bulk in prose.

MANNERS

GINGERLY, the poets sit.

Gingerly, they spend

The adjectives of dribbling flatteries,

With here and there a laceration

Feeding on the poison of a smile.

In the home of the poet-host

That bears the slants of a commonplace,

Eagerly distributed—

The accepted lyrical note—

The poets sit.

The poets drink much wine

And tug a little at their garments,

Weighing the advantages of disrobing.

(It is necessary to call them “poets”

Since, according to custom,

Titles are generously given to the attempt.)

Sirona, cousin of the poet-host,

Munches at the feast of words.

She endeavors to convince herself

That her hunger has become an illusion.

The poets, capitulating to wine,

Leave their birds and twilights,

Their trees and cattle at evening,

And study Sirona’s body—

Their manacled hands still joined

By the last half-broken link.

Beneath her ill-fitting worship

Young Sirona fears

That the poets are wordy animals

Circled by brocaded corsets....

Sirona, if you stood on your head

Now, and waved the brave plan of your legs,

Undisturbed by cloth,

The poets would be convinced

That you were either insane or angling.

But an exceptional poet,

Never present at these parties,

Would compliment your vigour

And scoff at the vain deceptions of privacy.

Vulgarity, Sirona, is often a word

Invented by certain men to defend

Their disdain for other men, who chuckle

At the skulking tyrannies of fashion.

Few men, Sirona, dare to become

Completely vulgar, but many

Nibble at the fringes.

AN ACROBAT, A VIOLINIST, AND
A CHAMBERMAID CELEBRATE

GEOMETRY of souls.

Dispute the roundness of gesturing flesh;

Angles, and oblongs, and squares

Slip with astounding precision

Into the throes of lifted elbows;

Into the searching perpendicular

Of fingers rising to more than ten;

Into the salient straightness of lips;

Into the rock-like protest of knees.

The flesh of human beings

Is a beginner’s-lesson in mathematics.

The pliant stupidity of flesh

Mentions the bungling effort

Of a novice to understand

The concealed mathematics of the soul.

Men will tell you that an arm

Rising to the sky

Indicates strident emotion;

Reveals a scream of authority;

Expresses the longing of a red engine

Known as the heart;

Rises like a flag-pole

From which the mind signals.

Men will fail to tell you

That an arm rising to the sky

Takes a straight line of the soul

And strives to comprehend it;

That the arm is a solid tunnel

For a significance that shoots beyond it.

The squares, and angles, and oblongs of the soul,

The commencing lines of the soul

Are pestered by a debris of words.

Men shovel away the words:

Falteringly in youth;

Tamely and pompously in middle age;

Vigorously in old age.

Death takes the last shovel-full away:

Death is accommodating.

Nothing is wise except outline.

The content held by outline

Is a slave in the mass.

Men with few outlines in their minds

Try to give the outlines dignity

By moulding them into towers two inches high,

In which they sit in lonely, talkative importance.

Men with many outlines

Break them into more, and thus

Playing, come with quickened breath

To hints of spiritual contours.

Seek only the decoration;

Avoid the embryonic yelping

Of argument, and scan your patterns

For angles, oblongs, and squares of the soul.

I overheard this concentrated prelude

While listening to an acrobat, a violinist, and a chamber-maid

Celebrate the removal of their flesh.

While playing, the violinist’s upper arm

Bisected the middle of the acrobat’s head

As the latter knelt to hear,

And the chamber-maid

Stretched straight on the floor, with her forehead

Touching the tips of the violinist’s feet.

Motion knelt to receive

The counselling touch of sound,

And vigour, in a searching line,

Reclined at the feet of sound,

Buying a liquid release.

Angles of arms and straight line of bodies

Made a decoration.

The violinist’s music

Fell upon this decoration;

Erased the vague embellishment of flesh;

And came to angles, squares, and oblongs

Of the soul.

NOVEL CONVERSATION

CERTAIN favorite words of men have gathered in a vale made of sound-waves. These words, far removed from human tongues and impositions, enjoy an hour of freedom.

Emotion

Men believe that I can speak

Without the aid of thought.

True, I have murdered many kings,

Leaned upon many cheeks,

And sought the release of music,

But when I ride upon words

I am forced to steal them from the mind.

Forgive me, now, if a trace of thought

Invades my liquid purity!

Truth

You need not defend your argument

With meek verbosity,

As though you dreaded its possible subtleties.

We are not men, but words!

Men have made me a lofty acrobat

Entertaining each of their desires

With some old twist on the bars.

But let us leave the frantic tasks

Forced upon us by men.

This is our grove of rest.

Intellect

Emotion, we have often crept

From our separate palaces,

Asking each other for secret favors.

Emotion

We laughed because the men who made us

Could not see our desperate trading.

We will end our laugh

Upon the dust of the last man on earth

And taste a peaceful strangeness.

Art

And I, the tortured child of your love,

Will slip from the fringe of your grayness

Into the void from which I came.

Poetry

And I, the moment when your arms

Touched each other in the night,

Will no longer strive

To tell the happening to men.

Fantasy

And I, the glistening whim

Of your secret love,

Will change to a question lurking within your dust.

Suggestion

And I, the beckoning second

When you curved a world in the twist of your fingers—

I shall vanish into your completeness.

Intellect

The hope of this magic ending

Is our only consolation.

Emotion, a new philosopher

Is forging blades for your torture,

And a braggart poet

Invites me to his disdain.

Let us return to our burdens.

THE SCRUB-WOMAN

(A Sentimental Poem)

TIME has placed his careful insult

Upon your body.

In other ages Time gave rags

To hags without riches, but now he brings

Cotton, calico, and muslin—

Tokens of his admiration

For broken backs.

Neat nonsense, stamped with checks and stripes,

Fondles the deeply marked sneer

That Time has dropped upon you.

While Time, in one of his well-debated moods

That men call an age, is attending to his manners,

I shall scan the invisible banners

Of meaning that unfurl when you move.

II

WHEN you open your mouths

I see a well, and strangled chastity

At the bottom—not chastity

Of the flesh, but lucid purity

Of the mind choked by a design

Of filth that has slowly turned cold,

Like a sewer intruding

Upon a small, dead face.

This is not repulsive.

Only things alive, with gaudy hollows,

Can repulse, but your death holds

A haggard candour that gently thrusts its way

Into the unimportance of facts.

You are not old: you were never young.

Life caressed your senses

With a heavy sterility,

And you thanked him with the remnant

Of thought that he left behind—

His usual moment of absentminded kindness.

When the muscles of your arm

Punish the brush that rubs upon wood

I see a rollicking mockery—

Rhythm in starved pursuit

Of petrified desire.

When the palms of your hands

Stay flat in dirty water

I can observe your emotions

Welcome refuse as perfume,

Intent upon a last ghastly deception.

When you grunt and touch your hair

I perceive your exhaustion

Reaching for a bit of pity

And carefully rearranging it.

Lift up your pails and go home;

Take the false tenderness of rest;

Drop your clothes, disordered, on the floor.

Vindictive simplicity.

MEDITATIONS IN A CEMETERY

You can write nothing new about death
GEROID LATOUR

DEATH,

Grandiosely hackneyed subject,

I live in a house one hundred years old

Placed in the middle of a cemetery.

The cemetery is bothered by mausoleums

Where fragments of Greek and Gothic

Lie in orderly shame.

Slabs and crosses of stone

Remain unacquainted with the bones

That they must strive to introduce.

The trees retain their guiltless sibilants.

The trees tell me upon my morning walk:

“In other cemeteries,

Shakespeare, Maeterlinck and Shaw

Fail to produce the slightest awe

In trees that do not create for an audience.”

Being finalities, the grass and trees

Find no need for rules of etiquette.

Delicacy must be effortless

Or else it changes to a patched-up dress.

But delicate and coarse are words

For quickness that tries to linger,

And slowness that strives to be fast!

Emotions and thoughts are merely

The improvisations of motion,

And lack a permanent content.

An aging tree is wiser

Than an aging poet,

And death is wiser than both.

The scale ascends out of sight

And I recall that the morning is light

And smaller notes await me.

The tomb-stones around my path

Have been crisply visited by names

To which they bear no relation.

Imagine the perturbation

Of a stone removed

From the comprehension of a mountain

And branded with the name of A. Rozinsky!

Recollecting journeys of my own,

I close my eyes and leave the stone.

The names of other men entreat—

Slight variations in line

Ponderously refusing to resign.

Men who will be forgotten

Try to hinder the process with stone.

Because they dread the affirmation

Of ashes undiscovered in wind,

I am walking through this cemetery.

The old grave-diggers will soon

Astonish the earth below this oak.

From their faces adjectives have fled,

Leaving the essential noun:

Leaving also the unwilling frown

With which they parley with the earth ...

Death, I must tell you of these things

Since you are unaware that they exist.

You send an efficient servant

To the almost unseen fluctuations

Of tomb-stones, skulls, and lilies,

Reserving your eyes for larger games.

SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF A POET’S LIFE

IN 1892

When literature and art in America

Presented a mildewed but decorous mien,

He was born.

During the first months of his life

His senses had not yet learned to endure

The majestic babble of old sterilities.

The vacuum of his brain

Felt a noisy thinness outside,

Which it could not hear or see,

And gave it the heavier substance

Of yells that were really creation

Fighting its way to form.

(When babies shriek they seek

Power in thought and action.

Life objects to their intent

And forces their voices to repent.)

At the age of four he lived inwardly,

With enormous shapeless emotions

Taking his limbs, like waves.

His mind was vapour censured

By an occasional protest

That mumbled and could not be heard.

People to him were headless figures—

Bodies surmounted by voices

That tickled like feathers, or struck like rocks.

Missiles thrown from moving mountain-tops

And leaving only resentment at their touch.

At ten the voices receded

To invisible meanings

That toyed with flesh-protected secrets of faces.

The voices made promises

Which the faces continually evaded,

And often the voices in vengeance

Changed a lip or an eye-brow

To repeat their neglected demands.

When swung to him the voices

Were insolent enigmas,

Tripping him as he stood

Midway between fright and indifference.

He sometimes tittered tranquilly

At the obvious absurdity of this.

His rages were false and sprang

From aloof thoughts chanting over their chains.

The immediate cause of each rage

Merely opened a door

Upon this changeless inner condition.

That species of intoxicated thought

Which men describe as emotion

Used its merriment to blind his eye-sight.

But anger, whose real roots are in the mind,

Tendered him times of hot perception.

He noticed that children held flexible flesh

That wisely sought a variety of patterns—

Flesh intent upon correcting

Its closeted effect—

While older people enticed their flesh

Into erect and formal lies

Repeated until their patience died

And they tried an unpracticed rebellion.

This was a formless revelation,

Unattended by words

But throwing its indistinct contrast

Over his broad one-colored thought.

At sixteen he employed words

To flay the contrast into shapes.

At seventeen he decided

To emulate the gay wisdom of children’s flesh.

He deliberately borrowed whiskey

To wipe away the lessons of older people

Lest they intrude their sterility

Upon his plotting exuberance.

He placed his hands on women,

Gently, boldly, as one

Experimenting with a piano.

He stole money, begged on street-corners,

And answered people with an actual knife

Merely to give his thoughts and emotions

A changing reason for existence.

Moderation seemed to him

A figure half asleep and half awake

And mutilating the truth of each condition.

At twenty-four his flesh became tired,

And to amuse the weariness

His hands wrote poetry.

He had done this before,

But only as a gleeful reprimand

To the speed of his limbs.

Now he wrote with the motives of one

Whose flesh is passing into less visible manners.

At times he returned to more concrete motions,

To befriend the handmaiden of his flesh,

But gradually he longed

For the complete secrecy of written creation,

Enjoying the novelty of a hiding-place.

In 1962

He died with a grin at the fact

That literature and art in America

Were still presenting a mildewed, decorous mien.

CANDID NARRATIVE

I

A chorus-girl falls asleep and, in a dream, speaks to a former lover. In her dream she holds the intelligence of a poet but still clings to certain of the qualities and mannerisms of her wakeful self.

SAY, kid, I’m in a candid mood;

The kind of mood that silences

The babbling dampness of my character.

I’m feeling as improbable

As an overworked Grecian myth

Fainting amid the smells of a Ghetto.

Now, Hypocrisy

Always slinks along

Winking an opaque eye at reality.

But when he spies a fantasy

He feels disgraced and leaves in haste.

What’s the use of telling a lie to a lie?

So, since I’m only a dream,

Listen to my candid scream.

You like to press a rouged cheek

Against your obscurity,

Like a third-rate poet

Pasting a sunset upon his emptiness.

Bashful mountebanks like you

Can seduce the eloquent delusion

Of time and give it a speechless limp.

The insincere trickle of your words

Was neither silence nor sound

But falteringly tempted both,

Like a tiny fountain unnoticed

At the feet of two large coquettes

The intricate laziness

Of your dimpled face

Received a petulantly naked

Ghost of thought, and seized it without desire.

Again it held the furbished effigies

Of sensuality

And tried to give them life

From the weariness of my face.

Yet I could have endured you

But for the fact that your moustache

Scraped across my lips

Like a clumsy imitation of passion.

Trivial insults have tumbled down

The pillared complacency of empires

Just as the thrust of your lips

Tripped my mercenary balance.

My lover now has the face of a dog,

With each corner of his lips

Pointing to a different Heaven,

Yet his greed and melancholy

Sometimes fondle each other

Upon the pressures of his mouth,

And the monotony of his kiss

Does not dissolve my stoicism.

Women who measure their gifts for lovers

Never hope for more than this.

II

UNLITERARY AND SHAMELESS

A young woman who has been renounced by her lover, because of her lack of culture, answers his derision.

YOUR cloistered naughtiness

Makes me as boisterous

As a savage attending

A minstrel-show of regrets.

The pampered carefulness

With which you distil a series

Of standardized perfumes from life

Takes its promenade

Between the realms of sanity and madness.

You are too precise to be quite sane

And too evasive to be insane,

And all that you have left me

Is a mood of windy sadness—

Emotions becoming verbose

In a last thin effort

To persuade themselves that they loved

A jewel that slipped from your fingers.

Your mind is a limpid warehouse

Filled with other mens’ creations,

And you pilfer a bit from each,

Disguising the scheme of your culture.

I would rather be a naked fool

Than a full-gowned erudite

Imitation of other mens’ hands.

I shall marry a desperado

And give him strength with which to paint

Black angels and muscular contortions

On panels of taffeta.

TWO SONNETS TO MY WIFE

I

BECAUSE her voice is Schönberg in a dream

In which his harshness plays with softer keys

This does not mean that it is void of ease

And cannot gather to a strolling gleam.

Her voice is full of manners and they seem

To place a masquerade on thought and tease

Its strength until it finds that it has knees,

And whimsically leaves its heavy scheme.

Discords can be the search of harmony

For worlds that lie beyond the reach of poise

And must be captured with abandoned hands.

The music of my wife strives to be free

And often takes a light, unbalanced voice

While madly walking over thoughtful lands.

II

MY wife relents to life and does not speak

Each moment with a deft and rapid note.

Sometimes a clumsy weirdness finds in her throat

And ushers in a music that is weak

And bargains with the groping of her heart.

But even then she plays with graver tones

That do not sell themselves to laughs and moans

But seek the counsel of a deeper art.

She drapes her loud emotions in a shroud

Of glistening thought that waves above their dance

And sometimes parts to show their startled eyes.

The depths of mind within her have not bowed

To sleek emotion with its amorous glance.

She slaps its face and laughs at its surprise!

FINALITIES

I

PRETEND that night is grandiose,

That stars win graves in every ditch;

Pretend that moonlight is verbose

And affable, like some grande-mère,

And men will say that your despair

Seduces luminous conceits,

Or call you an anaemic fool

Who stuffs himself with curdled sweets.

Thus sentenced to obscurity,

You can find more turbulent lips

And spaciously retreat from men

Immersed in pedestals and whips.

Amusedly, you can say that stars

Are wizened jests on every ditch;

That moonlight is a trick that jars

Your mind intent on other minds.

Having agreed upon your station,

Men will no longer heed your words,

And with a galloping elation

You can contradict yourself in peace.

II

THE wary perturbations of convinced

And secretly disdainful men are mild

And deftly tepid to the ears of one

Who entertains a careless, ungloved child.

Above the sprightly idleness of plates

Men sit and feign industrious respect,

With eye-brows often slightly ill at ease—

Cats in an argument are more erect.

At last the tactful lustres of farewells

Are traded: each man strolls off and forgets

The other—not a frill is disarranged.

The tension dexterously avoids regrets.

Two men have unveiled carved finalities

And made apologies for the event,

With voices well-acquainted with a task

Devoid of nakedness and ornament.

And each man might have murmured, “Yes, I know

What you will say and what I shall reply,”

And each man might have watched the other man

Smile helplessly into his mutton-pie.

III

THIS farcical clock is copying

A wood-chopper with nimble poise,

While Time, with still and fluid strides,

Perplexedly listens to the noise.

The room that holds this joke is filled

With the relaxed complacencies

Of poets hiding from themselves

With measured trivialities.

But one among them walks about

And watches with embarrassed eyes.

The others do not speak to him:

His nudeness is a tight disguise.

This fool is anxious to display

Interrogations of his mind

To poets who at work and play

Are isolated from their kind.

Reluctantly he finds his room,

Sits on the floor, with legs tucked in,

And grins up at another clock

Aloofly measuring its din.

IV

WHEN you are tired of ogling moltenly,

Your undertones explosively confess.

A shop-girl coughing over her cigarette

Expresses the burlesque of your distress.

Take your cocaine. It leaves a blistering stain,

But phantom diamonds are immune from greed.

You pluck them from the buttons of your vest,

Wildly apologising for your need.

Take more. Redress the thinness of your neck

With diamonds; entertain them with your breast;

Cajole them on the floor with fingertips

That cannot pause, dipped in a demon’s zest.

If you had not relented to a man

Who meddled with your face and stole your clothes,

Your shrill creative pleasures might be still

Incarcerated in the usual pose.

Hysteria shot its fist against your face

One day, and left the blood-spot of your mouth,

But when the morning strikes you there will be

More than hysteria in your answering shout.

V

LAUGHTER is a skeleton’s applause: