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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]

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