The Avignon Quintet (41 page)

As Thoreau nearly said: “Most wives live lives of quiet disapprobation.” A well-furnished mind in an ill-starred codpiece. (Toby.)

The wind whistles in my crows-nest of bones

In the conning tower of the skull

The sharpshooters ambush of the eyeball

Death will be only a change of code, of zones.

The python sadness shuffles in to claim … etc., etc.

A kid I fell into milk. I married and was a
coq en pute. A
writer big with book I hurried to Orta like a harvest in peril. To salvage a general principle from a mass of conflicting evidence can be both science and poetry.

Toby gorged on corybantic Cambridge Sausages. Marsupial dons bellying out like sails. Galleons of furry gowns.

Les grands sensuels agrés comme moi, Robin

Les sensuelles es Amour comme elle

Dans des jardins d’agrément jouant

Comme des poules dans les basses cours

Sont plutôt agronomiquement acariatres

Selon les pédérastes, les putains et les pâtres
.

Mais ce soir si ce joli temps permet

Si l’equinoxe persiste

Nous allons entendre chanter tous les deux

La petite doxologie des toiles d’arraignés
.

Éplucher le gros oignon de l’univers

Nous deux cachés par l’éventail de la nuit
.

Écoute, c’est le temps qui coule

C’est la nuit qui fuit. A moi Bouboul!

I have shifted this huge weight

By only a hair in half a lifetime

Of dead breath and sinew, to somewhere else,

Merely a shift of weight, you’d say,

Though it might be heavier than air

But slow to grow as mammoth’s teeth or hate,

A lifetime of nails growing on after death;

Yes, I have moved this huge weight,

By less than a weightless breath

And with it the weight of my afterlife

And massive, the weight of your death.

Something has collected around this long silence, Pia, the pearl of silence formed round a grain of sand; the golden embryo of the inner mind promised to the gnostics. They say there is nothing like love to develop the spirit except grief, sweet grief.
Ah! Ce beau temps où j’étais malheureuse
, sighed Madame de Sta
ë
l.

What would we not give for Byron’s ruthless charm?

Calm and fearlessness at birth should be the natural attributes of man, but entering the gear-box of process he has been twisted out of true, out of camber.

A wooden leg, a dimple filled with pus, a wart with an eye.

Ah! The milky bagpipes of the latent wish! Tonight Sylvie dragging and sucking at Chopin on the piano, while I read a book about India – the smoked dung of merchant enterprise.

Prose should have a gleam in it like mica. The glint of nervous insight. That moonlit night in the trenches the dead were hanging on the barbed wire like sperm in a girl’s bush. Today I have been working under high pressure weaving my necklace of suppositories. I have come to some conclusions, like sex is not an act but a thought: a Tip Toe Thought. (Toby in a high state of suppressed sincerity.)

Bruce told me that when the nurse walked on Sylvie’s right side she became invisible. Cranial hemiplegia? Apparently not however.

Pia said: “When Trash leaves me I run a temperature.” And I? And I?

I am forever writing her a letter in my head which I know will end in the Dead-Letter Office, will fall
au rebut, en souffrance
, that is why I suffer from a profuse loss of calcium. I am learning to see dreams as the expiatory device which voids the anti-social content of wishes and allows them to act themselves out harmlessly – not from civic conscience but from fear of punishment.