The Lost Lunar Baedeker (5 page)

She chased by moon-and-morn light

Philosopher's toes

As virginal                  as had he never worn them

Clear of ‘white marks mean money'

All quicks and cores

They fluttered to her fantasy

Fell into her lap

While she gathered her ferny flounces about them

They inappropriately passed

But Giovanni Franchi was there

He almost winked it at her

That he was there

His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets

The Philosopher had flung to him

And as she tripped by him

She guessed              these all

All            but the number of those toes

She made diurnal pilgrimage

To the trattoria

To eat

Trout                 that might have been trained for circuses

If minarets                     grew in miniature whirlpools

And mayonnaise          that helped her to forget

That what is underneath          need never matter

She put all minor riddles out of her

Such as

What was the under-cover of Franchi's book

Telling to the plaid pattern of the table-cloth

Too shy to interrogate

She sent ambassadors

To the disciple

They returned

Oh rats

Quite manifest              that Giovanni Franchi

Some semieffigy

Damned by scholiums

Knew no more              how many toes——

Than                 Giovanni Bapini knew himself

At the Door of the House

A thousand women's eyes

Riveted to the unrealisable

Scatter the wash-stand of the card-teller

Defiled marble of Carrara

              On which she spreads

Color-picture maps of destiny

In the corner

of an inconducive bed-room

      “Impassioned

Doubly impassioned

Sad

You see these three cards

But here is the double Victory

And there is an elderly lady

Ill     in whom you are concerned

This     is the Devil

And these two skeletons

Are mortifications

You        are going to make a journey

At evening       about love

Here is the Man of the Heart

Turning his shoulders to a lady

Covered with tears about matrimony

At the door of your house

There is a letter about an affair

And a bed      and a table

And this ace of spades turned upside-down

‘With respect'

Means        that some man

Has        well you know

Intentions        little honorable

Here you are        covered with tears

For a deception

The Man of the Heart

Is in thoughtfulness for a letter

He will make a journey at evening

And really         lady

I should say

It will not be long before you see him

For there he is at the door of the house

And look

Here are you

          And here is he

          In life and thought

At the door of the house”

Muddled among the aniline brightness of the Tauro cards

The wheels with wings

The rows on rows of goblets

          Passionate magenta blossoms

Hermits         —bring luck—

Moons          Prison-fortresses

Cudgels

A man cut in half

       Means a deception

And the nude woman

     Stands for the world

    Those eyes

Of Petronilla Lucia Letizia

       Felicita

Filomena Amalia

Orsola Geltrude Caterina Delfina

Zita Bibiana             Tarsilla

Eufemia,

Looking for the little love-tale

That never came true

At the door of the house

The Effectual Marriage

or
THE INSIPID NARRATIVE
of
GINA AND MIOVANNI

The door was an absurd thing

Yet it was passable

They quotidienly passed through it

It was this shape

Gina and Miovanni                who they were God knows

They knew      it was important to them

This being of who they were

They were themselves

Corporeally         transcendentally             consecutively

conjunctively         and they were quite         complete

In the evening they looked out of their two windows

Miovanni out of his library window

Gina from the kitchen window

From among his pots and pans

Where he so kindly kept her

Where she so wisely busied herself

Pots and Pans         she cooked in them

All sorts of sialagogues

Some say          that happy women are immaterial

So here we might dispense with her

Gina being a female

But she was more than that

Being an incipience             a correlative

an instigation of the reaction of man

From the palpable to the transcendent

Mollescent irritant of his fantasy

Gina had her use          Being useful

contentedly conscious

She flowered in Empyrean

From which no well-mated woman ever returns

Sundays          a warm light in the parlor

From the gritty road           on the white wall

anybody could see it

Shimmered a composite effigy

Madonna           crinolined        a man

hidden beneath her hoop

Ho for the blue and red of her

The silent eyelids of her

The shiny smile of her

Ding dong         said the bell

Miovanni            Gina called

Would it be fitting for you to tell

the time for supper

Pooh       said Miovanni      I am

Outside time and space

Patience said Gina      is an attribute

And she learned         at any hour to offer

The dish        appropriately delectable

What had Miovanni made of his ego

In his library

What had Gina wondered    among the pots and pans

One never asked the other

So they      the wise ones      eat their suppers in peace

Of what their peace consisted

We cannot say

Only that he was magnificently man

She insignificantly a woman who understood

Understanding      what is that

To Each    his entity    to others

their idiosyncrasies      to the free expansion

to the annexed     their liberty

To man his work

To woman her love

Succulent meals     and an occasional caress

                 So be it

                                       It so seldom is

While Miovanni thought alone in the dark

Gina supposed that peeping        she might see

A round light        shining     where his mind was

She never opened the door

Fearing that this might blind her

Or even

That she should see     Nothing at all

So while he thought

She hung out of the window

Watching for falling stars

And when a star fell

She wished      that still

Miovanni would love her to-morrow

And as Miovanni

Never gave any heed to the matter

He did

Gina was a woman

Who wanted everything

To be everything in woman

Everything everyway at once

Diurnally variegate

Miovanni always knew her

She was Gina

Gina who lent monogamy

With her fluctuant aspirations

A changeant consistency

Unexpected intangibilities

Miovanni remained

Monumentally the same

The same Miovanni

If he had become anything else

Gina's world would have been at an end

Gina with no axis to revolve on

Must have dwindled to a full stop

In the mornings she dropped

Cool crystals

Through devotional fingers

Saccharine          for his cup

And marketed

With a Basket

Trimmed with a red flannel flower

When she was lazy

She wrote a poem on the milk bill

The first strophe       Good morning

The second        Good night

Something not too difficult to

Learn by heart

The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table

Greasy cleanliness        of the chopper board

The coloured vegetables

Intuited quality of flour

Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal

Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses

Pet simplicities of her Universe

Where circles were only round

                                       Having no vices.

(This narrative halted when I learned that the house which inspired it was the home of a mad woman.

—Forte dei Marmi)

Human Cylinders

The human cylinders

Revolving in the enervating dust

That wraps each closer in the mystery

Of singularity

Among the litter of a sunless afternoon

Having eaten without tasting

Talked without communion

And at least two of us

Loved a very little

Without seeking

To know if our two miseries

In the lucid rush-together of automatons

Could form one opulent well-being

Simplifications of men

In the enervating dusk

Your indistinctness

Serves me the core of the kernel of you

When in the frenzied reaching-out of intellect to intellect

Leaning brow to brow           communicative

Over the abyss of the potential

Concordance of respiration

Shames

Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory

And reciprocity

Of conception

And expression

Where each extrudes beyond the tangible

One thin pale trail of speculation

From among us we have sent out

Into the enervating dusk

One little whining beast

Whose longing

Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow

And one elastic tentacle of intuition

To quiver among the stars

The impartiality of the absolute

Routs           the polemic

Or which of us

Would not

Receiving the holy-ghost

Catch it       and caging

     Lose it

Or in the problematic

Destroy the Universe

With a solution.

The Black Virginity

Baby Priests

On green sward

Yew-closed

Scuttle to sunbeams

Silk beaver

Rhythm of redemption

Fluttering of Breviaries

Fluted black silk cloaks

Hung square from shoulders

Truncated juvenility

Uniform segregation

Union in severity

Modulation

Intimidation

Pride of misapprehended preparation

Ebony statues training for immobility

Anaemic jawed

Wise saw to one another

Prettily the little ones

Gesticulate benignly upon one another in the sun buzz—

Finger and thumb circles postulate pulpits

Profiles forsworn to Donatello

Munching tall talk vestral shop

Evangelical snobs

Uneasy dreaming

In hermetically-sealed dormitories

Not of me or you Sister Saraminta

Of no more or less

Than the fit of Pope's mitres

It is an old religion that put us in our places

Here am I in lilac print

Preposterously no less than the world flesh and devil

Having no more idea what those are

What I am

Than Baby Priests of what “He” is

or they are—

Messianic mites tripping measured latin ring-a-roses

Subjugated adolescence

Retraces loose steps to furling of Breviaries

In broiling shadows

The last with apostolic lurch

Tries for a high hung fruit

And misses

Any way it is inedible

It is always thus

In the Public Garden.

Parallel lines

An old man

Eyeing a white muslin girl's school

And all this

As pleasant as bewildering

Would not eventually meet

I am for ever bewildered

Old men are often grown greedy—

What nonsense

It is noon

And salvation's seedlings

Are headed off for the refectory.

Ignoramus

Shut it up

Sing silence

To destiny

Give half-a-crown

To a magician

Half a glance

To window-eclipse

And count the glumes

Of your day's bargaining

Lying

In the lining

Of your pocket

                       While compromising

Between the perpendicular and horizontal

Some other tramp

Leans against

The night-nursery of trams

Puffs of black night

Quiver the neck