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Title: The Sardonic Arm
Author: Maxwell Bodenheim
Release Date: August 17, 2019 [EBook #60114]
Language: English
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[Illustration: The
SARDONIC ARM
_Bodenheim._--
1923 COVICI-McGEE CHICAGO]
Copyright 1923
Covici-McGee
Chicago
{ This is a limited edition of 575 copies of which }
{ 550 copies are for sale and this copy is }
No. 559.
DEDICATED TO MINNA AND FEYDA
--They will meet under
different circumstances
CONTENTS
CONCERNING AMERICA 1
CRY, NAKED AND PERSONAL 3
FANTASY 6
HATRED OF METAPHOR AND SIMILE 9
TIME, INFINITY AND ETERNITY DESCEND UPON A BLACK DERBY HAT 11
I WALK UPON A STREET 13
THE INCURABLE MYSTIC ANSWERS WESTERN AMBITIONS 15
PLATONIC NARRATIVE 17
PORTRAITS 19
NEGRO CRIMINAL 26
SHORT STORY IN SONNET FORM 27
FEMININE TALK 28
THE SWORD CONVERSES WITH A PHILOSOPHER 31
CAPTAIN SIMMONS 34
MORE ABOUT CAPTAIN SIMMONS 36
CAPTAIN SIMMONS’ WIFE 37
NORTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO 38
LANDSCAPE 41
COUNTRY GIRL 42
NONDESCRIPT TYPIST 43
CONCERNING EMOTIONS 44
METAPHYSICAL ELIZABETH 45
DESCRIPTION AND EXHORTATION 46
INEVITABLE 47
THE NEGROES WHO TURNED WHITE 48
EXPRESSIONS ON A CHILD’S FACE 50
PSYCHIC CLOWNS 51
DEAR MINNA 53
VILLAGE CLERK 55
REALISM 56
AMERICAN VAUDEVILLE SHOW 58
Reluctant Foreword
_If I yield to the remorseful redundancy of a foreword, with its
bedraggled battalions of fiercely insinuating words, it is from no mere
desire to invite the ridicule of impatient time, or to rail against that
host of vacant insincerities which betrays the animations of life. It
may be that I do not look upon words as intimidating a fixed content, or
beckoning to an inevitable style. It may be that I regard words as
flexible lures seducing the essential emptiness of life, with little,
false promises--promises of emotional and mental gain and reward; haloes
and bludgeons with which a void may attain the mirage of toiling or
dancing importance. And perhaps, in the desperate hope of achieving a
proper festival of sound, I have summoned words to a reiteration of
defeated antics, without in any way attempting to gain those exhausted
futilities known as convictions and explanations. And if, through this
foreword, I can revel in a pensive obscurity--a veil that must be
carefully removed with the reading of poems that follow--I shall feel
that I have furnished the exercise of amusement to certain sterile and
over-confident rituals of emotion and mind._
_The poetic situation in America is, indeed, a blustering and verbose
invitation to boredom and a slight, reviling headache. When not engaged
in scrubbing the window pane ten times over, lest it prove opaque to an
astigmatic public, American poets are discovering, with great glee, the
perspiring habits and routines of sex, or naively deifying the local
mannerisms of a blithely juvenile country--a lurching, colloquial,
fist-swinging melee of milkmen depositing bottles on doorsteps and
acquiring dignity in the process; chorus-girls and farmhands telling
their troubles in a stilted slang; factory-owners falling in love with
their female employees, to the tune of delicate and novel symbolism
concerning “a longing to enter the house of her being”; ravings over the
strength and poignancy of corn-fields and country-roads--“O, the corn,
how it aches!” and “What is better than the patient and sturdy road?”--;
much roaring about the importance and hard beauty of mills and
factories--crudely smoky boxes of avarice faced by little, kneeling
poets.... Ah, the list, when extended, defies amusement. You must leave
the theater unless you desire the thankless experience of vomiting._
_The commercial cacophony of American lusts and greeds has borrowed a
clarinet, a flute, and a saxophone from the admiration of American
poets and is one-stepping with thousands of words, after the office and
factory have closed for the day, “Swee-et Mama, well your papa’s done
gone mad!”--the jerky, leering pandemonium of actual jazz on a polished
floor interests me far more than its more proper and adulterated
echoes--the glorious American poets of our time._
_There are, again, American poets who have turned their eyes to Europe,
yes, the fact is apparent--they have turned their eyes to Europe, and
they can, on occasion, become cynical animals, discovering seven
thousand different ways of describing the contortions that lead to
sexual intercourse, and displaying breasts and limbs with an infinite
amount of abandoned bravado. Again, they have heard of the European
Dadaists, yes, undoubtedly they have heard of the European Dadaists, and
they have now reduced the pronoun “I” to “i,” commenced their lines with
small letters, and exhibited a brave and startling hatred for commas and
separate words. In Europe, this literary revolution holds a distorted
incisiveness and many an original thought, heaved up from the
catastrophe of words. In America, certain poets, with great gusto, have
torn three buttons from their coats and are standing on their heads.
Yawning, we turn the page to the greyly psychological school of
poets--William James and Havelock Ellis, viewed with ecstasy behind a
magnifying glass, while someone provides a blurred replica of Bach’s
music._
_That tantalizing obscurity of words, luring the nimbleness of mental
regard--subtlety--and those deliberate acrobatics that form an original
style--both are waiting for the melodrama, comedy and lecture to
subside. Alas, what a long waiting is before them--pity these two
aristocrats and admire their isolated tenacity. Drop the trivial gift of
a tear, also, upon a wilted, elaborate figure thrown into cell number
thirty-two and trying to remember that his name was once Intellect. Then
deposit the lengthened confession of a sigh upon another drooping form
known as Delicate Fantasy--an elusive Liar who ravishes colors without
mentioning their names (not the endless blue, green, white, yellow, red,
lavender, mauve, pink, brown, cerise, golden, orange, and purple of
American Imagists). They have kicked him into the cellar, damn them.
Recognize the importance of his bruises. And also, spy, in the loosely
naive tumult, an agile, self-possessed pilgrim known as Irony. They have
kicked him in the stomach, these symbols of earth triumphant.... And
now, you must not look upon these words as a stormy unfolding of
conviction and explanation. The American spectacle has aroused a mood;
words conceal the essential helplessness; and the lurking emptiness
behind life separates into little, curious divisions of sound. The
undulations have ended._
The
SARDONIC ARM
CONCERNING AMERICA
Agitated child,
Listening to the words of clown,
Charlatan, blackguard, clergyman,
And vainly trying to follow their commands
Simultaneously, with legs and arms
Swinging like demented Jehovahs,
The plastic shapelessness of mud
Waits to receive your castigated fevers.
And all the children whose inarticulate
Hearts smashed together make your body--
The burly, waggish rogue
Paid to dance in your cabarets;
The shoulder-shaking girl
Who mistakes one shiver for immortality;
The roughly earnest gunman
Whose blundering insurrection
Clutches a cool device;
The man whose eyes are coins
Encased in viscous white;
The fox-like politician
Leaping on small prizes in the dark;
The farmer, lending his different costume
To the ox-like patience of earth;
The manual laborers
With minds as minute and obscure as bricks,
And softly prominent hearts;
The factory-girls who try to scold
The murmur of their souls
With one hundred slang phrases--
All of them will lose
Their imaginary differences
In the lenient refuge of mud.
But their souls, ridiculously
Ignorant of national boundary-lines,
And amused at the physical promise
Or ruin that men extract
Tortuously from life--
Their souls will instigate
A more conspicuous conflict.
CRY, NAKED AND PERSONAL
Conversation in oak trees,
Better than the talk of men
Because it ends where they begin
Futilely.
Ferns, and invasion of moss,
Waiting for the conquest of words
To dwindle with the years
And find, in the doom of green,
A mute and sprightly correction.
These trees do not proclaim
That men are fools or geniuses.
Their rustling tolerance
Does not seek to intrude
Upon the indifference of time,
And it is appropriate
That their leaves should wait to contain
The discarded syllables
Of human erudition.
I have seen a man
Gaze upon an oak tree,
As one who hates a patient enemy.
Sensual desires and mental plots
Had marked his face not tenderly.
Combat of envy and pride
Gained the dilated prize of his eyes
As he looked upon the tree.
Then his voice achieved
The solace of admiration.
“The leaves are beautiful in Autumn.
This oak tree has a pleasant sturdiness.”
When confronted by a tree,
Or sunset prowling down the hills,
The sensual boast of men
Trembles with fear and raises
The shield of adoration.
Look upon the oak tree
Without that simulated courage
Falsely wrung from soothing sound.
The oak tree is a living prison
Where the thoughts and lusts of men
Dangle to the whims of winds
And learn an unexpected tolerance.
Seek revenge upon the tree;
Dress it in capricious metaphor;
Fling your costumes on its frame.
Or, better still, realize
That the oak tree does not
Demolish the souls of men.
I say that all of nature
Is only the mingled womb and tomb
With which an ancient illusion
Perpetuates the religions that keep it alive.
Before I leave the oak tree
Laughter captures my lips.
Newton, a dry and wavering leaf,
Has fallen to the earth.
FANTASY
“Geography locates actual mountains,
Rivers, and valleys, while critics
Of literature and art
Draw imaginary maps
Small as the nail of an infant’s thumb.
Then nouns and adjectives
Are purchased and arranged
To magnify and defend the size
Of exquisite differences
In altitude, position, and direction.
Trivially vociferous,
Your geographical critics
Display their little maps to men
Whose eyes are already convinced
Or turned in another direction.”
Torban, a scholar from Mars,
Dropped his speech and laughed.
His laugh was the sound of a mountain
Emancipated by humour
And cavorting over the plains.
The mountain fled, but Torban remained,
Made gigantic by its aftermath.
For size does not reside
[Illustration]
In the legs and torsos
That men hug, frightened, or with glee.
He said: “Criticism in Mars
Resembles your hours of sleep.
Each night we leave creation;
Greet the steeply slanting beds;
And turn our large eyes inward
To a complicated cabaret:
Cabaret filled with relieving jigs;
Cabaret crammed with irascible magicians
Who persist in spoiling their little tricks
By proclaiming the honesty of their intentions;
Cabaret in which malice,
Dignified or torrential,
Turns creators into beetles
And slays them ingeniously;
Cabaret in which Erudition,
Tempted by emotional coquettes,
Swaggers greyly past the footlights;
Cabaret in which Lust
Defends itself with thoughtful monologues,
Stopping to expectorate
Into metaphysical cuspidors;
Cabaret in which the mind
Scorns the morphine of emotion
Until, exhausted, it is forced
Secretly to indulge in the drug;
Cabaret of toothless bickerings
That lisp like market-women
At an ancient Fair;
Cabaret in which Tolerance and Indifference
Sit on the floor below the banquet-table
And wait for crumbs that accidentally
Slip from the over-full plates;
Cabaret in which Logic
Swallows the whiskey of dogmas,
Reels to the little bed-chamber,
And gradually falls asleep;
Cabaret in which qualities,
Enlarged and beribboned, engage
In arguments with smaller qualities,
Each longing for the other’s size.”
Torban paused, and his smile,
A thread of quicksilver bettering his face,
Encouraged the purpose of my voice.
I said: “The cabaret that you describe
Reminds me of criticism on earth.”
He answered: “One difference exists.
We go to sleep before we criticize--
An excellent antidote for truth and lies!”
HATRED OF METAPHOR AND SIMILE
Ta-ra-ta-ta!
The ancient horn is once more bleating
Its ephemeral plea to immortality.
Thus announced, the author of the play,
Naked, and with a scholar’s face
Ill-at-ease above the flesh,
Proclaims the purpose of the play.
His speech, long and unadorned,
Requires this concentrated translation:
“Life is a sensual hunter
And only his trophies are real.
These protesting animals
May sometimes be cleverly scrutinized
By six or seven intellects
Secreted in the noisy audience.”
Ta-ra-ta-ta!
The horn resounds, and its echoes
Are caught by an uproar of sounds--
Excited disciples within the theater.
“Down with fantasy!”
“Realism and flesh forever!”
“No more lies about the soul!”
“Give us earth and logic!”
“Murder the mountebanks and butterflies!”
“Down with metaphor and simile!”
The play is about to begin
When two unfortunate poets
Are discovered in the audience.
Morbid, grotesque, and nonchalant,
They wear involved, embroidered clothes
And smoke emotional cigarettes,
Flicking the ashes carefully
Into the rage of faces around them.
And one poet recommends
A ruffled, satirical vest for the hairy chest
Of a broad man seated near him.
With cries, in which the earthly illusion
Mounts its strident throne,
The audience expels the two poets
With ritual of feet and fists.
Unperturbed, the poets
Stoop to mend their embroidered sleeves
Tom by the frantic audience.
With this important task completed,
They stroll away.
TIME, INFINITY, AND ETERNITY, DESCEND UPON A BLACK DERBY HAT
Vicious and sincere,
The black derby hat flaunts itself
Upon the head of an amateur libertine.
The libertine is a nervous rascal
Asking too many favors
From one spear-point exalted by men,
But the black derby hat,
Poised and incorruptible,
Curves its black no to the senses.
To those who cannot see,
The black derby hat is only a sugar-bowl
Turned upside-down and out of place,
Or one of many crowns
Bestowing their ugly pathos
Upon the struggle of a nation,
Or the way in which a dreamer
Pitifully says hello to the stars,
Or a symbol of bulky manhood
Swaggering in an ancient trap.
But to eyes that can look beyond
The surface rites of America
Bending over bargain-counters of flesh,
The black derby hat is an alabaster
Sentinel, defending its realm
Against the pompous indifference
Of Time, Infinity, and Eternity.
The black derby hat is an outline of earth,
Bold and abrupt, remaining
Indifferent to the desperate commands
Of sex and greed, and he who wears it
Is only a helpful accident
Bringing publicity to the hat.
Uncompromising, the black derby hat
Suggests the blunt isolation of intellect,
And yet it may have been made
By some weak serf of emotion.
From the contact of incongruities
Life evolves the more perfect shape,
And so, the black derby hat,
Gliding through the frantic defeats
Of a city street,
Coolly protects its realm
Against the scarecrow-contempt
Of Time, Infinity, and Eternity.
I WALK UPON A STREET
Must I see a gutter
In which the hurried machination
Of water carries bits of apple peeling
To some profound, obscure intelligence?
And if the gutter is to me
Merely the masterful travel of brown
Speeding with odds and ends of red,
To lend importance to a dream,
Will this belief decrease my size
When death reproves my inefficient limbs?
I walk upon a street
Where trite deceptions glide
Ceaselessly.
Upon this street the spasmodic revolt
Of color refuses to join
The orderly, substantial lie.
Scattered anarchists of color,
Thin and incorrupt,
Contend against the ponderous devices
Of lust for flesh and gold.
With a spiritual savageness
Colors bring their lucid treason
To ancient, shrouded tyrannies.
The knitted green of this girl’s sweater
Is a badge releasing
A cool republic of desire
Unrelated to earth.
Her famished opaque face
Feeds on sleek anticipations--
Unconscious incongruity.
Color alone is real,
Waving perpetually
Over the graves of thought and emotion.
From the vaster shapes of color
Small and involved broods of thought and emotion
Are born to scorn their distant mothers.
The ruffian dream recedes
Over a span of twenty thousand years,
And color, awake and supreme,
Waits to be once more divided
By another nightmare dream.
If men could see this they might kneel
Upon this sidewalk and observe
The importance of apple-peelings
Testing their spirals of red
Against the thick, brown stream.
THE INCURABLE MYSTIC ANSWERS WESTERN AMBITIONS
Western men,
Your life is a minor rhapsody
For flute and violin.
With sounds, now shrill, now suave,
You steal your hymns and frolics
From the surface dirt of realism
And the curves of sensuality.
Your feeble mysticism
Strains at the task of lifting tables
And placing naïve retorts
Into the mouths of spirits.
Your erudition is the vain
Gesture of your repentance
Grown over-thin and complex.
Western men, you are beggars
Devouring bits of guile
Tossed from a violent mirage.
The contours of a rose
Bribing the quiet madness of evening
With cunning promises of red,
Are more important than your sweating love
And the rushing dreads of your market-places.
The contours of a rose
Will still arrange their subtle dream
When your clever schemes of mud
Win the drifting pension of dust.
Your charts and diagrams
Are merely a ragamuffin’s initials
Cut into an ancient gateway
That guards the invisible meaning of life.
PLATONIC NARRATIVE
Tomato soup at four A. M.
We seemed to sit upon the floor
But, with a feathery discretion,
We advised our bodies
To make the floor a glistening fundamental
Flattened by the walk of centuries.
Continuing the advice,
We told our bodies to arrange
A variation on the floor
And give the floor a living
Reason for existence.
Our bodies, with clandestine movements,
Accepted the advice
And became the essences of Plato,
Almost tempting our flesh
To renounce its weight.
Our lifted knees were actors
Simulating treason to our souls,
With their prominence of bone.
They were interviewed
By elbows that held a light disbelief.
Our backs against the cushions
Had disappeared, and we did not move
For fear that all of us
Might rush away through the openings.
Our heads were fiercely bent down,
As though they felt an ecstasy
Of shame at their crudity ...
When we returned to the tomato soup
It was an insipid fluid,
But we drank it indifferently,
And it is also possible
That an unearthly laugh
Peered through the crevices of our eyes,
Finding no need for sound.
PORTRAITS
I.
_Stenographer_
Intellect,
You are an electrical conspiracy
Between the advance guards of soul and mind.
Thoughts and spiritual instincts,
Profound and unfanatical,
Sit plotting against the enmity
That seeks to wall them in separate castles...
A thought and a spiritual instinct
Link themselves for an instant
Upon the face of this stenographer.
Unknown to her mind and speech
A gleam of intellect contradicts her features,
And she spies the jest of her relation
To the droning man beside her.
This incredible news
Will be doubted by poets and scientists.
II.
_Waitress_
Musicians and carpenters
Meet upon your trays of food:
Aesthetics and the flesh
Play their little joke upon dogma,
Urged by the rhythm of your hands.
Your rouged cheeks slip unnoticed
Through the sexless turmoil.
The rituals are hastened
Lest they become self-conscious...
I stop you and remark:
“The sylvan story of your hair
Is damaged by your rhinestone comb.
May I remove it?” Then you stare.
The fact that you have been
Greeted by something other than a wink
Almost causes you to think.
You walk away, holding an emotion
That skims the lips of many adjectives.
Confused, uncertain, scornful--
With none of them fused together.
III.
_Shop-Girl_
Yellow roses in your black hair
Hold the significance
Of stifled mystics defying Time.
Yellow roses in your black hair
Can become to certain eyes
The trivial details of emotion.
Yellow roses in your black hair
Often embarrass passing philosophers
Who suddenly realize
That they have been furtively snatching at color and light.
Shop-girl, in the midst of your frolic,
Take this portrait without surprise.
Portraits are merely pretexts.
IV.
_Manicurist_
Maudlin, hurt, morose,
Tender, angry, remote,
Whimsical, frigid, impatient--
Compel these adjectives to become
Friendly to each other
And let them stumble in unison
Beneath the muscular trouble of life.
The careful Boss who sends them on
Holds one eye of bitterness
And another of sentimentality,
Closing each one on different occasions.
The careful Boss may be your soul,
Tired manicurist, amazing
The fragrant barber-shop
With words of valiant prose.
Ferretti, the mildly dying barber,
Loves his bald head with one finger
And whispers, “She’s crazy, I fire her tomorrow.
When customer ask her to eat with him
She laugh and tell him she no care
To pay too much for indigestion.
She’s crazy. I fire her tomorrow.”
Ferretti does not know
That souls are not entirely unconcerned
With straining for effects.
V.
_Housewife_
Seraphic and relaxed, you take
Your novel with uncertain thumbs,
As one who lingers over cake
And dreads the thought of final crumbs.
Frown at my precious sorcery
And label me an envious elf.
If human beings could agree
Their boredom might revenge itself.
O youthful housewife, weighing grains
Of joy upon your empty smile,
The total of my bolder gains
Is but a more impressive guile.
Your serious child wins the alert
And limpid art of playing tag,
While your emotions rest inert
Like dried fruit in a paper bag.
And yet I envy both of you
And wish that I could also find
The mildness of your fancied view,
Where feelings dance and thoughts are kind.
VI.
_Woman_
They worship musical sound
Protecting the breast of emotion.
Their feelings pose as fortune-tellers
And angle for coins from credulous thoughts.
Shall we abandon this luxury
Of mild mist and wild raptures?
Your face refrains from saying yes
But your closed eyes roundly
Reward the luminous sentence.
Greece and Asia have exchanged
Problems upon your face,
And the fine poise of your head
Tries to catch their conversation.
Few people care to use
Thought as a musical instrument
That brings its singing restraint to grief and joy,
But we, with straight arms, will descend
Daringly upon this situation.
The full-blown confusion of life
Will detest our intrusion.
VII.
_Old Actor_
Any minor poet can claim
That his subject resembles music.
(“Her steps were notes of music.”
“His presence was like a song.”)
You are a long-neglected
Instrument from which the player,
With over-confident lips, blows only
A jet of dust that falls upon
The damp chagrin of his face.
Moist from the futile effort
He asks his listeners to admire
Imaginary notes.
They clap their hands, and he must retire
To the slow digesting of his lie.
Old actor, you have finished reciting Hamlet;
Your pennies are gathered; and you depart.
NEGRO CRIMINAL
From the pensive treachery of my cell
I can hear your mournful yell.
Centuries of pain are pressed
Into one unconscious jest
As your scream disrobes your soul.
The silence of your iron hole
Is hot and stolid, like a guest
Weary of seeing men undressed.
Like the silence, I listen
Because I dread the glisten
Of a hidden humour that strains
Under the stumble of all pains.
Brown and wildly clownish shape
Thrown into a cell for rape,
You contain the tortured laugh
Of a pilgrim-imbecile whose staff
Taps against a massive comedy.
Melodrama burlesques itself with free
And stony voice, and wears a row of masks
To lure the joviality of tasks.
Melodrama, you, and I,
We are merely tongues that try
To ogle a protesting dream
Into whisper, laugh, and scream.
SHORT STORY IN SONNET FORM
Loud chatter in a thousand minor lines
Was your religion, and your art was pain
Disguised by phrases of verbose disdain.
You married an old man who gave you wines
Lukewarm and pink, until your tipsy youth,
Grown weary of evading sensual lies,
Ran to idiot-Pierrot whose cries
Created that delusion known as truth.
The ache of your sincerity betrayed
His awkward falseness, and he turned away,
Grinning until your bullet found his head.
Then people claimed that you had merely paid
Insanely for a tritely sordid play.
Your lyric could not answer--it was dead.
FEMININE TALK
_First Woman_
Do you share the present dread
Of being sentimental?
The world has flung its boutonnière
Into the mud, and steps upon it
With elaborate gestures!
_Second Woman_
Sentimentality
Is the servant-girl of certain men
And the wife of others.
She scarcely ever flirts
With creative minds,
Striving also to become
Graceful and indiscreet.
_First Woman_
Sappho and Aristotle
Have wandered through the centuries,
Dressed in an occasional novelty--
A little twist of outward form.
They have always been ashamed
To be caught in a friendly talk.
_Second Woman_
When emotion and the mind
Engage in deliberate dialogue,
One hundred nightingales
And intellectuals find a common ground,
And curse the meeting of their slaves!
_First Woman_
The mind must only play
With polished relics of emotion,
And the heart must never lighten
Burdens of the mind.
_Second Woman_
I desire to be
Irrelevant and voluble,
Leaving my terse disgust for a moment.
I have met an erudite poet
With a northern hardness
Motionless beneath his youthful robes.
He shuns the quivering fluencies
Of emotion, and shifts his dominoes
Within a room of tortured angles.
But away from this creative room
He sells himself to the whims
Of his wife, a young virago
With a calculating nose.
Beneath the flagrant pose
Of his double life
Emotion and the mind
Look disconsolately at each other.
_First Woman_
Lyrical abandon
And mental cautiousness
Must not mingle to a magic
Glowing, yet deliberate.
_Second Woman_
Never spill your wine
Upon a page of mathematics.
Drink it decently
Within the usual tavern.
THE SWORD CONVERSES WITH A PHILOSOPHER
_Sword_
The Hindoo raises his arms
And holds them level with his shoulders
Till they become still and permanent, like horizons.
But I prefer to stumble
Into abrupt harmonies
That must ever be flung aside.
With one quick slash I cut
Lips of death upon an expressionless breast,
And a vermilion sincerity
Pardons the sophistry of flesh.
It is better to make
And leave the moments of a poem
Than to erect an ingenious pedestal
Upon which blindness solemnly squats.
_Philosopher_
Men’s tongues are slow, and they have made you
To avenge their hidden shame at this.
You give startling girdles to virgins,
Red beards to thieves,
And writhing necklaces to children,
Because the tongues of men are slow
And revel in your quicker rhythms.
An idiot whirls you around his head
And persuades himself that he is swift.
Imagination drenches his eyes
And he spreads himself flat on your blade.
_Sword_
All of your words are concentrated
Into the glittering censure of my blade!
_Philosopher_
Life wraps its layer of touch around one,
Like a haunting blanket
Smothering the taunting lips of a child.
Curving their fingers around your hilt
Men strive to purchase the triumph
Of an imagined escape.
I teach them plaintively to weave
Schemes of consolation
On the broad texture of their lives.
You tell them to slash the fabric,
Reaching into the black space underneath it.
You are not a symbol of cruelty.
An innocent impatience
Sharpens the comedy of your blade.
_Sword_
Men have only two choices--
To worship idols or mimic fireflies,
And I lend my strength to each choice,
Teaching them to abandon
The harlequin raptures of words.
_Philosopher_
You bring them yearning turbulence,
And I, a quick-tongued refuge.
Silence will pardon both of us.
CAPTAIN SIMMONS
An arbitrary architect
Became his mind, and planned
Cathedrals, mansions, and shops
In a room enclosed by hair.
And so a crowded town
Occupied the dwarfed miles in his head,
And along the boundary-line
That separated thought from emotion
Darkly seething slums grew up.
Owing to the lack of space
Prevailing in mental slums,
Some buildings had been forced
Into the realm of emotion.
Within these structures half-breeds lived--
Creatures whose inconsequent
Color prevented them
From being entirely logical,
And whose reeking impulses
Were deplorably snubbed by thought.
Being from the slums of mind
These hybrids loved the dirt of arguments
Inherited from centuries of men,
Stopping now and then
To order emotional brandy.
It is unnecessary
To tell that Captain Simmons was old,
With a body like the fading dream
Of an athlete, and a face
Made womanly by age.
MORE ABOUT CAPTAIN SIMMONS
Captain Simmons’ legs
Were praying after much capering.
Legs can pray without kneeling
When they steal pity from city streets.
On Captain Simmons’ face
Wrinkled inhibitions were giving
Moth-eaten lace to that soft tolerance
Where memory and dying desire sleep without dreams.
Captain Simmons’ black suit
Fitted him loosely while his mind
Became him tightly, and the reason
Flickered in his smile.
For all of life he had hidden
Beneath a loose generosity
In order to escape the fact
That certain of his thoughts
Were supplied with tights and slyness,
And his smile was a lit candle held
For a moment uncertainly over this situation.
If one mentioned that Captain Simmons
Was possessed by the plight of eyes
Like pinched chicaneries of fate,
Above a face of visual penuries,
One would only hide his essential parts
Beneath the futility of explanation.
CAPTAIN SIMMONS’ WIFE
She moved in a calculating trot,
Relinquishing hairsbreadths of her life
With each step, and gathering
Atoms of humour and melancholy
Into one last excuse for existence.
It is true that she was playing
Housewife to her thoughts and emotions.
Her intangible household had attained
A weak and exquisite indirectness,
And she fiddled with its meager neatness;
Protected them as they stooped
Over the knitting of remorse;
Fed them platters of minced scandal
And mildly censured the relish with which they ate;
Persuaded them that they could dream best
When they were uncomfortable;
Swept out bedrooms for fear
That the talkative candour of her dislikes
Might falter in the presence of dust;
And clinked the silver on side-boards
In an effort to convince herself
That she was still robustly mercenary.
Again, she scanned the spots
On a bridal-gown and planned,
As she had done for years
To send it to an imaginary cleaner.
NORTH CLARK STREET, CHICAGO
I.
Tame and ghastly coffins
Display their shamefaced grays and reds
Against the passive vividness of morning.
From the base of these large coffins
Men and women walk,
Like briskly servile automata.
Some repentant toy-maker
Has given them a cunning pretense of life.
A waitress hurries to her work.
Her yellow hair and face stained red
Blend into a garish mendicant
Who steals unreal composure from the morning.
Behind her tramps a bloodless Jew.
The stench of endless denials
Has wrenched his youthful face
Into a prophecy of middle age.
He does not see the lamely leaden
Shop-girl, where despair and apathy,
Fighting, produce the motion of her limbs.
She does not see this elderly laborer
Upon whose face an artist
[Illustration]
Lies smashed and gasping for breath,
And he does not regard
This thread irresolutely falling
From a tapestry of memory:
This slender woman in black.
The glittering indifference of morning
Divides their faces.
II.
Afternoon has fallen on this street,
Like an imbecilic organ-grinder
Grinning over his discords.
Dead men and women spin
Their miracles of motion
Upon the grayness of this street.
In this old Jew’s shop
A woman bargains over calico.
With a ghostly naïveté
She reprimands the price of her shroud.
In this pawn-shop stands a man
Parting with his clarinet.
He walks away, with dangling arms,
Like a swindled Gabriel.
In a lunchroom sits a woman
Whose face is a tired sin
Seeking comfort in religion.
A young girl near her is an angel
Puzzled by streaks of mud upon her face
And asking questions of her vanity.
Outside, dead men and women
Are whipped on by the explosive magic
Of an old, resistless masquerade.
Street-cars, wagons, and motor-trucks
Rattle their parodies on life,
And over all the afternoon
Twists, like an imbecilic organ-grinder
Snickering over his discords.
III.
Night has thrown his ecstasy
Of staring, counterfeit eyes
Over the torrent of this street.
Men with faces quicker
And more furtive than time
Stand motionless in doorways.
Women stride down this street.
Many fingers have pulled their faces
To a haggard lack of expression.
They join the motionless men
In the doorways and disappear.
And over them the tame and ghastly coffins
Display their shamefaced grays and reds
Against the tangled vividness of night.
LANDSCAPE
The countless vagaries of maple leaves,
Elastic humbleness of flowers and weeds,
The hill, a placid stoic to all creeds,
They use an obvious language that deceives
The subtle theories of human ears.
Their tongue is motion and they scorn the rhyme
And meter made by men to soothe their fears.
Beneath the warm strength of each August hour
They spurn cohesion and the plans of thought,
With quick simplicity that seems confused
Because it signals mystic whims that tower
Above the thoughts and loves that men have caught:
Beyond the futile words that men have used.
COUNTRY GIRL
Your face is stencilled with a pensiveness.
Your face contains a minor lyric trapped
By dainty ignorance, and tamely capped
By hair as trimly lifeless as your dress.
You suffer from the drooling praise of old
And youthful men, who strive to win a blind
And soothing admiration from your mind,
And do not try to make your thoughts unfold.
This comedy would fade into a host
If it were not rewarded by the dead
But unrelenting poet on your face.
Your eyes are heavy with his reckless ghost:
The trouble of his hands is on your head
As you peer out into a clouded space.
NONDESCRIPT TYPIST
Within an office whose exterior
Resembles an ultra-conservative mind
You battle with the avaricious words
Of a meager, petrified man.
Your face is brown stagnation
Sometimes astounded by a thrust
Of chattering wistfulness.
Bravery is fear
Effectively sneering at itself,
And you are forever wavering
Upon the edge of this condition.
Yet your obscurity
Is an important atom
In the mysterious march of time.
CONCERNING EMOTIONS
And if I say that pain is but
A circus barker whose loud cries
Seek to reward a trivial show,
Will you confess that I am wise?
“Must it be emotional?” you asked,
After I had thrown
Words into a carnival-scope.
Sobriety and merriment
Borrowed the sixteenth century
Within your voice, and sought
The identity of sternness--
Mental sternness pretending to ignore
The confetti thrown by emotion
In a carnival unique.
Emotions can be prancing curves
Fashioned by relaxing thoughts.
Should I kiss you, Questioner,
The delicate anti-climax
Of a mental caper
Might perish on crimson vapor!
Tired of frenzies and satiations
Emotions often wander to poets
And ask for more fantastic decisions
For fire that glows but does not burn.
METAPHYSICAL ELIZABETH
They gave you strait-jackets to bore you.
Like an unwilling promise
Your legs were tied together.
But people can only violate
Their own conception of reality,
And your actual curves
Preserved their sculptural liberty.
Leaving their semblance on your flesh
Your lines sped inward till they gained
The center where emotion changes
To a speck of quivering clarity.
Within you phantoms of reality
Danced with plausibilities of mind,
Seeking to be consumed
By the oblivion which is understanding.
You feared that your return to motion
Would mean a succession of disappointments--
Tamely grazing arrows
Changed to wounds by the desiring heart
Take my hand and move.
Only two statues can stride together
In a manner invisible
Save to certain unreasonable adjustments
Of eyesight and of hearing.
DESCRIPTION AND EXHORTATION
Truly, this age will be known
As one of minute extremes
Courting an elderly shape
In a violent bar-room scene.
An Amazon made filthy by centuries,
And fuming pygmies, own the stage.
Thin furies of emotion
Name every color in the rainbow
Without its skillful assent,
And little mental skeletons
Stamp with clumsy weirdness
On effigies of the heart.
The pygmies often sneak
To the prancing Amazon
And the ensuing love-scene produces
Small memories of Walt Whitman.
This age is not metaphysical.
Followers of Dada,
Weary of electron-soliloquies
And fleshly ecstasies with flat feet,
Sit in the gallery
And throw loose malice at the display,
Evading their motives with an eager creed.
Concentrate your aim,
Followers of Dada.
INEVITABLE
The insurrection of a flea
Compared to driving tusks
Of elephants, is just as strong.
Stupidity need not be long.
The insurrection of a flea
Attains philosophy and spice.
Fleas salt their eating with a creed
That warms the monotone of greed.
The insurrection of a flea
Will leave with tense insistence till
The suburbs of eternity.
O small fanatic on a spree.
The flea is poet in a land
That does not understand his lunge.
He makes his own immaculate laws
And awaits forever threatening claws.
THE NEGROES WHO TURNED WHITE
The souls of negroes, thrown into a shout,
Roll their hallelujahs out
To the flashing blandness of the sky.
The sky does not divide their cries
Into meanings foolish and wise:
To the sky all men have but one cry.
Still, amusement has often thrown
Separate shades upon the monotone,
Playing with the sleep of firm beliefs.
Amused, we give these negroes forms
Distinct and bounding under storms
Of sounds that catapult their joys and griefs.
A negro with his bald despair
Seduced by remnants of silver hair,
Converses with an old King known as God.
He longs to have his tortured stare
Rewarded with a golden chair
While other negroes thump the sod
With heavy echoes of his request.
With a cold, castrated zest
He pleads for rest, and he is bold,
While scientists and troubadours
Cling more closely to their floors.
“How d’yah kno-ow, how d’yah kno-o-ow
Dat the blood done sign mah na-a-ame?
Yes it’s so-o-o, yes it’s so-o-o,
Jesus wrote it down in fla-a-ame.”
The other negroes sing
With gliding fear, and swing
The child-like joke of their arms to emotions
That surge like an army searching for its eyes.
But suddenly a quick surprise
Tricks each negro’s face with fright--
Their skins are gleaming pink and white.
White philosophers and scientists
Strike each other with dubious fists
Within the negroes’ brains, while poets fight
Like blistered urchins wrapped in gloom.
Shrinking underneath the uproar
With its bursts of phantom gore,
The negroes shriek against their doom.
With bending celebration of knees
They crush against their leader’s pleas.
“Lord Almighty, make us black!
This strange noise strikes us on the back!
We has had enough of whips!
Calm this devil with your lips!”
EXPRESSIONS ON A CHILD’S FACE
Dawn?--no, the hunted transparency of dawn
Curving from the white throat of a child
And shaken in the still cup of his face.
Then a sudden dispersal of swerving light
Carrying away the defeated
Wisdom of a smile.
Thought?--no, the persistent shudder
Of emotion that is almost thought.
The invisible recklessness of perfume
Enveloping the beginning of a question.
Sadness?--no, the growth of a dim inclination
To delve into the rancid importance of flesh:
Then weeping, to wash away
The ritual of disappointment.
PSYCHIC CLOWNS
_First Clown_
We gaze upon a negro shoveling coal.
His muscles fuse into a poem
Stifled and sinister,
Censuring the happy rhetoric of morning air.
Some day he will pitch the stretched simplicity
Of his tent upon the contented ruins
Of a civilization,
Playing with documents and bottles of perfume
Found in deserted, broken corridors.
_Second Clown_
The barbarous comedy
Lost in profuse confessions
And often described as life,
Lends an attitude of conviction
To the mechanical retreat of time.
_First Clown_
Do you hear beneath the irregular strut
Of this city an imperceptible groan?
Time is turning the jail-house key.
They build larger jails for time;
He makes larger keys of blood-stained iron.
Endlessly he emerges
From complicated delusions of freedom.
_Second Clown_
That desperately grotesque
Wanton known as imagination
Can plunge beyond both men and time.
Imagination slips down
Upon the last edges of thought and feeling
And teaches them to transcend
The forlorn bravado of swinging legs and arms.
_First Clown_
We are two psychic clowns
Brandishing the poverty of words
Into insolent oddities of sound.
Come, men are waiting to nail us
Upon the crucifix of their little logics!
DEAR MINNA
Catastrophe in a bric-a-brac shop.
The proprietor lies murdered.
Pieces of cups, jars, and vases
Have attained the disorderly freedom
So obnoxious to bankrupt fanatics.
Once the cups, jars, and vases
Were symmetrical and empty,
And immersed in the task of holding nothing.
Now they have snatched a voice from fragments;
Spell many an accidental sentence;
Renounce the hollow lie.
Death, you take the stiffly obvious shapes
Of objects and crack them with your fingers--
A shattered invitation
To curiosity and anticipation--
And I am grateful to you for that.
My eyes grow weary scanning the living array.
Each man takes his inch upon the shelves
And will not move, until your paw
Robs him of microscopical convictions.
Dear Minna, read the newspapers
And gloat with me over death’s industry.
Banker, Freudian, Socialist,
Knocked from the shelves and changed
To symbols that can lure conjecture.
It is well that we are metaphysical.
Death must not become
A mere black frame surrounding
The memorized reiterations.
Death must remain an irresistible
Beckoning to reckless speculations
And continue to offer an amorous arm
To the recalcitrant antics of words.
VILLAGE CLERK
Rabelais and Maeterlinck
Have subsided to one grin
Upon your sharply cumbersome face.
Coarseness and a psychic hope
Dominate your voice
As you prattle to women
Purchasing sugar and salt.
Then your face and voice
Alter to a serious fraud
Eagerly learning the technique of deceptions,
As you answer this dryly emasculated
Grey-beard, discussing the tendencies in hogs.
When the night replenishes
Your store of morbid desires,
You will try to piece together
A cajoling violin
From your sweet-heart’s syllables,
Fumbling with hot hands for the unseen strings.
REALISM
Regard an American farm.
That jaded collaborator,
Daylight, has just arrived.
Wavy signal of smoke
From the wooden farm-house disappears
Beneath the bluely ascetic lack of interest.
Horses, pigs, and cows
Assemble their discontent.
The result is a Chinese orchestra
Devoid of discipline and cohesion,
With all of the players intoxicated.
The animals do not realize
That their voices should portray
The farmer in the angular house;
The hackneyed prose of his life;
The expanding soul of his corn-fields.
Turn from the absence of human wisdom
And see the lights in the farm-house.
Dimly circumscribed and steady,
They symbolize future events.
The farm-hand walks to the barn,
With an ox-like dragging of feet.
Black shirt, and overalls
Whose color has been removed by dirt,
Obscure the heavy knots of his body.
His cork-screw nose ascends
To the eyes of an unperturbed pig.
Love and hate to him
Are mouthfuls of coarse food hastily gulped
During lulls in his muscular slavery.
Beneath the slanting pungency
Of the barn he vanishes,
And with meaningless sounds
He pays his meager tribute to life.
Then the farmer persuades his age
To indulge in an unwilling stumble
Across the yard.
His grey beard is the end of a rope
That has gradually throttled his face.
Within him, avarice
Is awkwardly practising the rhythms
Of weak emotions benignly, belatedly
Preparing for celestial rewards.
Within the cluttered farm-yard
He stands, a figure of niggardly order.
Earth, the men who scrape at your flanks
Can never stop to examine
The thin line of speech that goes adventuring
Where your brown hills bite the sky.
AMERICAN VAUDEVILLE SHOW
This vacuous, clattering spectacle
Has collected the heart-beats of a nation.
Greed, like a gorged Machiavelli,
Slumps down in the green plush seat
And wonders whether it has not blundered,
While a sentimental song,
Like a kindly infant,
Interferes with the clink of coins.
Hatred, juvenile and deformed,
Earns the smirking oblivion
Of fat women mangling sound.
The wrangling babble of ignorance
Turns to silence underneath
The opium of innuendoes.
Acrobats appear and seem
To be raping phantom lovers
No longer beautiful and fresh
But mechanically endured.
Part of the audience is also
A battered stoic clasping worn-out mistresses.
Clog-dancers enervate
The thumping martyrs of their feet,
And chorus-girls offer the lines of their bodies
With whining voices.
Dreams are cheap, and green plush seats
Appropriately, snugly hold
The expensive hallucinations.
[Illustration: colophon]
_Printing Service_
_Company_
_Chicago_
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