The Lost Lunar Baedeker (3 page)

Has no affair with me

In my congested cosmos of agony

From which there is no escape

On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations

Or in contraction

To the pin-point nucleus of being

Locate an irritation             without

It is                                          within

                                               Within

It is without

The sensitized area

Is identical              with the extensity

Of intension

I am the false quantity

In the harmony of physiological potentiality

To which

Gaining self-control

I should be consonant

In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force

Pain calls up in me

The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice

A fashionable portrait-painter

Running up-stairs to a woman's apartment

Sings

        “All the girls are tid'ly did'ly

        All the girls are nice

        Whether they wear their hair in curls

        Or—”

At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization

The conception                            Brute

Why?

           The irresponsibility of the male

Leaves woman her superior Inferiority

He is running up-stairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony

Incidentally with the exhaustion of control

I reach the summit

And gradually subside into anticipation of

Repose

Which never comes

For another mountain is growing up

Which            goaded by the unavoidable

I must traverse

Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night-hours

Confuses while intensifying sensibility

Blurring spatial contours

So aiding elusion of the circumscribed

That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast

Comes from so far away

And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth

Is no part of myself

There is a climax in sensibility

When pain surpassing itself

Becomes Exotic

And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation

Uniting the opposing and resisting forces

In lascivious revelation

Relaxation

Negation of myself as a unit

            Vacuum interlude

I should have been emptied of life

Giving life

For consciousness in crises              races

Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

Have I not

Somewhere

Scrutinized

A dead white feathered moth

Laying eggs?

A moment

Being realization

Can

Vitalized by cosmic initiation

Furnish an adequate apology

For the objective

Agglomeration of activities

Of a life.

LIFE

A leap with nature

Into the essence

Of unpredicted Maternity

Against my thigh

Touch of infinitesimal motion

Scarcely perceptible

Undulation

Warmth            moisture

Stir of incipient life

Precipitating into me

The contents of the universe

Mother I am

Identical

With infinite Maternity

      Indivisible

      Acutely

      I am absorbed

      Into

The was—is—ever—shall—be

Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious

Impression of a cat

With blind kittens

Among her legs

Same undulating life-stir

I am that cat

Rises from the sub-conscious

Impression of small animal carcass

Covered with blue-bottles

—Epicurean—

And through the insects

Waves that same undulation of living

Death

Life

I am knowing

All about

      Unfolding

The next morning

Each woman-of-the-people

Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet

Doing hushed service

Each woman-of-the-people

Wearing a halo

A ludicrous little halo

Of which she is sublimely            unaware

I once heard in a church

—Man and woman God made them—

                                                 Thank God.

Italian Pictures

July in Vallombrosa

Old lady sitting still

Pine trees standing quite still

Sisters of mercy               whispering

Oust the Dryad

O consecration of forest

To the uneventful

I cannot imagine anything

Less disputably respectable

Than prolonged invalidism in Italy

At the beck

Of a British practitioner

Of all permissible pastimes

Attendant upon chastity

The one with which you can most efficiently insult

Life

Is your hobby of collecting death-beds

Blue Nun

So wrap the body in flannel and wool

Of superior quality from the Anglo-American

Until that ineffable moment

When Rigor Mortis

Divests it of its innate impurity

While round the hotel

Wanton Italian matrons

Discuss the better business of bed-linen

To regular puncture of needles

The old lady has a daughter

Who has been spent

In chasing moments from one room to another

When the essence of an hour

Was in its passing

With the passionate breath

Of the bronchitis-kettle

And her last little lust

Lost itself in a saucer of gruel

But all this moribund stuff

Is not wasted

For there is always Nature

So its expensive upkeep

Goes to support

The loves

Of head-waiters

The Costa San Giorgio

We English make a tepid blot

On the messiness

Of the passionate Italian life-traffic

Throbbing the street        up            steep

Up              up              to the porta

Culminating

In the stained frescoe of the dragon-slayer

The hips of women sway

Among the crawling children they produce

And the church hits the barracks

Where

The greyness of marching men

Falls through the greyness of stone

Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction

Hoarsely advertised as broken heads

BROKEN HEADS                    and the barber

Has an imitation mirror

And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves

Shaving

ICE CREAM

Licking is larger than mouths

Boots than feet

Slip        Slap      and the string dragging

And the angle of the sun

Cuts the whole lot in half

And warms the folded hands

Of a consumptive

Left outside                her chair is broken

And she wonders how we feel

For we walk very quickly

The noonday cannon

Having scattered the neighbour's pigeons

The smell of small cooking

From luckier houses

Is cruel to the maimed cat

Hiding

Among the carpenter's shavings

From three boys

—One holding a bar—

Who nevertheless

Born of human parents

Cry when locked in the dark

Fluidic blots of sky

Shift among roofs

Between bandy legs

Jerk patches of street

Interrupted by clacking

Of all the green shutters

From which

Bits of bodies

Variously leaning

Mingle eyes with the commotion

For there is little to do

The false pillow-spreads

Hugely initialed

Already adjusted

On matrimonial beds

And the glint on the china virgin

Consummately dusted

Having been thrown

Anything or something

That might have contaminated intimacy

OUT

Onto the middle of the street

Costa Magic

                                  Her father

Indisposed to her marriage

And a rabid man at that

My most sympathetic daughter

Make yourself a conception

As large as this one

Here

But with yellow hair

From the house

Issuing                     Sunday dressed

Combed precisely

                            SPLOSH

Pours something

Viscuous

Malefic

Unfamiliar

While listening up                I hear my husband

Mumbling                         Mumbling

Mumbling                       at the window

      Malediction

      Incantation

Under an hour

Her hand to her side        pressing

     Suffering

Being bewitched

Cesira fading

Daily      daily         feeble              softer

The doctor            Phthisis

The wise woman                   says to take her

So we               following her instruction

I and the neighbour

Take her—

The glass rattling

The rain slipping

I and the neighbour and her aunt

Bunched together

And Cesira

Droops across the cab

Fields and houses

Pass                  like the pulling out

Of sweetmeat ribbon

From a rascal's mouth

Till

A wheel in a rut

Jerks back my girl on the padding

And the hedges into the sky

Coming to the magic tree

Cesira becomes as a wild beast

                      A tree of age

If Cesira should not become as a wild beast

It is merely Phthisis

This being the wise woman's instruction

Knowing she has to die

We drive home

To wait

She certainly does in time

It is unnatural in a Father

Bewitching a daughter

Whose hair        down     covers her thighs

Three Moments in Paris

I. One O'Clock at Night

Though you had never possessed me

I had belonged to you since the beginning of time

And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you

Leaning against your shoulder

And your careless arm across my back             gesticulated

As your indisputable male voice           roared

Through my brain and my body

Arguing dynamic decomposition

Of which I was understanding nothing

Sleepily

And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect

Boomed         as it seemed to me         so sleepy

Across an interval of a thousand miles

An interim of a thousand years

But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you clear your throat

Deafening             woke me

And I caught the thread of the argument

Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude

And ceased to be a woman

Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman

The animal woman

Understanding nothing of man

But mastery           and the security of imparted physical heat

Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics

Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children

Or the thunder of alien gods

But you woke me up

Anyhow             who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity

“Let us go home         she is tired          and wants to go to bed.”

II. Café du Néant

Little tapers leaning            lighted diagonally

Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant

Leaning to the breath of baited bodies

Like young poplars fringing the Loire

Eyes that are full of love

And eyes that are full of kohl

Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente

Trailing the rest of the animal behind them

Telling of tales without words

And lies of no consequence

One way or another

The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black

To black cravat

To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat

What color could have been your bodies

When last you put them away

Nostalgic youth

Holding your mistress's pricked finger

In the indifferent flame of the taper

Synthetic symbol of             LIFE

In this factitious chamber of       DEATH

The woman

As usual

Is smiling            as bravely

As it is given to her to be        brave

While the brandy cherries

In winking glasses

Are decomposing

Harmoniously

With the flesh of spectators