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
(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 postulat
e 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
Of the Clown of Fortune
Dribble out of his trouser-ends
In dust-to-dust
Till cock-kingdom-come-crow
You can hear the heart-beating
Accoupling
of the masculine and feminine
Universal principles
Mating
And the martyrdom of morning
Caged with the love of houseflies
The avidity of youth
And incommensuration.
Day-spring
Bursting on repetition
“My friend the Sun
You have probably met before”
Or breakfasting on rain
You hurry
To interpolate
The over-growth
Of vegetation
With a walking-stick
Or smear a friend
With a greasy residuum
From boiling your soul down
You can walk to Empyrean to-gether
Under the same
Oil-silk umbrella
“I must have you
Count stars for me
Out of their numeral excess
Please keep the brightest
For the last
Lions’ Jaws
O FAR away on the Benign Peninsular
. . . . .
That automatic fancier of lyrical birds
Danriel Gabrunzio
with melodious magnolia
perfumes his mise en scène
where impotent neurotics
wince at the dusk
The national arch-angel
loved
several countesses
in a bath full of tuberoses
soothed by the orchestra
at the ‘Hotel Majestic Palace’
. . . the sobbing
from the psycho-pathic wards
of his abandoned harem
purveys amusement for ‘High Life’
The comet conquerer
showers upon continental libraries
translated stars . . .
accusations of the alcove
where
with a pomaded complaisance
he trims rococo liaisons . . .
. . . a tooth-tattoo of an Elvira
into a Maria’s flesh
And every noon
bare virgins riding alabaster donkeys
receive Danriel Gabrunzio
from the Adriatic
in a golden bath-towel
signed with the zodiac
in pink chenille
* * * *
Defiance of old idolatries
inspires new schools
. . . .
Danriel Gabrunzio’s compatriots
concoct new courtships
to intrigue
the myriad-fleshed Mistress
of “the Celebrated”
The antique envious thunder
of Latin littérateurs
rivaling Gabrunzio’s satiety
burst in a manifesto
notifying women’s wombs
of Man’s immediate agamogenesis
. . . Insurance
of his spiritual integrity
against the carnivorous courtesan
. . . Manifesto
of the flabbergast movement
hurled by the leader Raminetti
to crash upon the audacious lightning
of Gabrunzio’s fashions in lechery
. . . and wheedle its inevitable way
to the “excepted” woman’s heart
her cautious pride
extorting betrayal
of Woman wholesale
to warrant her surrender
with a sense of . . . Victory
Raminetti
cracked the whip of the circus-master
astride a prismatic locomotive
ramping the tottering platform
of the Arts
of which this conjuring commercial traveller
imported some novelties from
Paris in his pocket . . .
souvenirs for his disciples
to flaunt
at his dynamic carnival
The erudite Bapini
experimenting
in auto-hypnotic God-head
on a mountain
rolls off as Raminetti’s plastic velocity
explodes his crust
of library dust
and hurrying threatening nakedness
to a vermilion ambush
in flabbergastism
. . . he kisses Raminetti
full on his oratory
in the arena
rather fancying Himself
in the awesome proportions
of an eclectic mother-in-law
to a raw ménage.
Thus academically chaperoned
the flabbergasts
blaze from obscurity
to deny their creed in cosy corners
to every feminine opportunity
and Raminetti
anxious to get a move on this beating-Gabrunzio-business
possesses the women of two generations
except a few
who jump the train at the next station . . .
. . . while the competitive Bapini
publishes a pretty comment
involving woman in the plumber’s art
and advertises
his ugliness as an excellent aphrodisiac
* * * *
Shall manoeuvres in the new manner
pass unremarked?
. . .
These amusing men
discover in their mail
duplicate petitions
to be the lurid mother of “their” flabbergast child
from Nima Lyo, alias Anim Yol, alias
Imna Oly
(secret service buffoon to the Woman’s Cause)
. . . .
While flabbergastism boils over
and Ram: and Bap:
avoid each other’s sounds
This Duplex-Conquest
claims a “sort of success”
for the Gabrunzio resisters.
Envoi
Raminetti gets short sentences
for obstructing public thoroughfares
Bapini is popular in “Vanity Fair”
As for Imna Oly . . .
I agree with Mrs. Krar Standing Hail
She is not quite a lady. . . .
. . . . .
Riding the sunset
DANRIEL GABRUNZIO
corrects
the lewd precocity
of Raminetti and Bapini
with his sonorous violation of Fiume
and drops his eye
into the fatal lap
of Italy.
II
SONGS TO JOANNES
(1917)
Loy in Florence, ca. 1909, Stephen Haweis photograph (Collection Roger L. Conover)
Songs to Joannes
I
Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane
I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
These are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of Experience
Coloured glass
II
The skin-sack
In which a wanton duality
Packed
All the completion of my infructuous impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced
My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair
A God’s door-mat
On the threshold of your mind
III
We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill’d on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings
IV
Once in a mezzanino
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like abortions
With human throats
And Wisdom’s eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair
One bore a baby
In a padded porte-enfant
Tied with a sarsenet ribbon
To her goose’s wings