But for the abominable shadows
I would have lived
Among their fearful furniture
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
—Sweeping the brood clean out
V
Midnight empties the street
Of all but us
Three
I am undecided which way back
To the left a boy
—One wing has been washed in the rain
The other will never be clean any more—
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a haloed ascetic
Threading houses
Probes wounds for souls
—The poor can’t wash in hot water—
And I don’t know which turning to take
Since you got home to yourself—first
VI
I know the Wire-Puller intimately
And if it were not for the people
On whom you keep one eye
You could look straight at me
And Time would be set back
VII
My pair of feet
Smack the flag-stones
That are something left over from your walking
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching— — — — — — —
VIII
I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
— — — — — — — — — —
Behind God’s eyes
There might
Be other lights
IX
When we lifted
Our eye-lids on Love
A cosmos
Of coloured voices
And laughing honey
And spermatozoa
At the core of Nothing
In the milk of the Moon
X
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn
XI
Dear one at your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands
XII
Voices break on the confines of passion
Desire Suspicion Man Woman
Solve in the humid carnage
Flesh from flesh
Draws the inseparable delight
Kissing at gasps to catch it
Is it true
That I have set you apart
Inviolate in an utter crystallization
Of all the jolting of the crowd
Taught me willingly to live to share
Or are you
Only the other half
Of an ego’s necessity
Scourging pride with compassion
To the shallow sound of dissonance
And boom of escaping breath
XIII
Come to me There is something
I have got to tell you and I can’t tell
Something taking shape
Something that has a new name
A new dimension
A new use
A new illusion
It is ambient And it is in your eyes
Something shiny Something only for you
Something that I must not see
It is in my ears Something very resonant
Something that you must not hear
Something only for me
Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations
Disorb inviolate egos
Where two or three are welded together
They shall become god
— — — — — — —
Oh that’s right
Keep away from me Please give me a push
Don’t let me understand you Don’t realise me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me you — you — me
XIV
Today
Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible
To you
I bring the nascent virginity of
—Myself for the moment
No love or the other thing
Only the impact of lighted bodies
Knocking sparks off each other
In chaos
XV
Seldom Trying for Love
Fantasy dealt them out as gods
Two or three men looked only human
But you alone
Superhuman apparently
I had to be caught in the weak eddy
Of your drivelling humanity
To love you most
XVI
We might have lived together
In the lights of the Arno
Or gone apple stealing under the sea
Or played
Hide and seek in love and cob-webs
And a lullaby on a tin-pan
And talked till there were no more tongues
To talk with
And never have known any better
XVII
I don’t care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut
Red a warm colour on the battle-field
Heavy on my knees as a counterpane
Count counter
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round vacuum
Dilating with my breath
XVIII
Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night
XIX
Nothing so conserving
As cool cleaving
Note of the Q H U
Clear carving
Breath-giving
Pollen smelling
Space
White telling
Of slaking
Drinkable
Through fingers
Running water
Grass haulms
Grow to
Leading astray
Of fireflies
Aerial quadrille
Bouncing
Off one another
Again conjoining
In recaptured pulses
Of light
You too
Had something
At that time
Of a green-lit glow-worm
— — — — — — —
Yet slowly drenched
To raylessness
In rain
XX
Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern
XXI
I store up nights against you
Heavy with shut-flower’s nightmares
— — — — — — — — — —
Stack noons
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun
XXII
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager’s revival
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
And flowered flummery
Break
s
To my silly shoes
In ways without you
I go
Gracelessly
As things go
XXIII
Laughter in solution
Stars in a stare
Irredeemable pledges
Of pubescent consummations
Rot
To the recurrent moon
Bleach
To the pure white
Wickedness of pain
XXIV
The procreative truth of Me
Petered out
In pestilent
Tear drops
Little lusts and lucidities
And prayerful lies
Muddled with the heinous acerbity
Of your street-corner smile
XXV
Licking the Arno
The little rosy
Tongue of Dawn
Interferes with our eyelashes
— — — — — — — —
We twiddle to it
Round and round
Faster
And turn into machines
Till the sun
Subsides in shining
Melts some of us
Into abysmal pigeon-holes
Passion has bored
In warmth
Some few of us
Grow to the level of cool plains
Cutting our foot-hold
With steel eyes
XXVI
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
We sidle up
To Nature
— — — that irate pornographist
XXVII
Nucleus Nothing
Inconceivable concept
Insentient repose
The hands of races
Drop off from
Immodifiable plastic
The contents
Of our ephemeral conjunction
In aloofness from Much
Flowed to approachment of — — — —
NOTHING
There was a man and a woman
In the way
While the Irresolvable
Rubbed with our daily deaths
Impossible eyes
XXVIII
The steps go up for ever
And they are white
And the first step is the last white
Forever
Coloured conclusions
Smelt to synthetic
Whiteness
Of my
Emergence
And I am burnt quite white
In the climacteric
Withdrawal of your sun
And wills and words all white
Suffuse
Illimitable monotone
White where there is nothing to see
But a white towel
Wipes the cymophanous sweat
—Mist rise of living—
From your
Etiolate body
And the white dawn
Of your New Day
Shuts down on me
Unthinkable that white over there
— — — Is smoke from your house
XXIX
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude
Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon
Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiencies
Begging dorsal vertebrae
Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blurr
Anything
Than seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other
Let them clash together
From their incognitoes
In seismic orgasm
For far further
Differentiation
Rather than watch
Own-self distortion
Wince in the alien ego
XXX
In some
Prenatal plagiarism
Fœtal buffoons
Caught tricks
— — — — —
From archetypal pantomime
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
— — — —
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And the most of Nature is green
— — — — — — — — — —
What guaranty
For the proto-form
We fumble
Our souvenir ethics to
— — — — — — —
XXXI
Crucifixion
Of a busy-body
Longing to interfere so
With the intimacies
Of your insolent isolation
Crucifixion
Of an illegal ego’s
Eclosion
On your equilibrium
Caryatid of an idea
Crucifixion
Wracked arms
Index extremities
In vacuum
To the unbroken fall
XXXII
The moon is cold
Joannes
Where the Mediterranean — — — — —
XXXIII
The prig of passion — — — —
To your professorial paucity
Proto-plasm was raving mad
Evolving us — — —
XXXIV
Love — — — the preeminent litterateur
III
CORPSES AND GENIUSES
(POEMS 1919–1930)
O Hell
To clear the drifts of spring
Of our forebear’s excrements
And bury the subconscious archives
Under unaffected flowers
Indeed—
Our person is a covered entrance to infinity
Choked with the tatters of tradition
Goddesses and Young Gods
Caress the sanctity of Adolescence
In the shaft of the sun.
The Dead
We have flowed out of ourselves
Beginning on the outside
That shrivable skin
Where you leave off
Of infinite elastic
Walking the ceiling
Our eyelashes polish stars
Curled close in the youngest corpuscle
Of a descendant
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams
Fixing the extension of your reactions
Our shadow lengthens
In your fear
You are so old
Born in our immortality
Stuck fast as Life
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension
We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness
Having swallowed your irate hungers
Satisfied before bread-breaking
To your dissolution
We splinter into Wholes
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries
In our busy ashbins
Stink the melodies
Of your
So easily reducible
Adolescences
Our tissue is of that which escapes you
Birth-Breaths and orgasms
The shattering tremor of the static
The far-shore of
an instant
The unsurpassable openness of the circle
Legerdemain of God
Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves
Break on our edgeless contours
The mouthed echoes of what
Has exuded to our companionship
Is horrible to the ear
Of the half that is left inside them.
Mexican Desert
The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive
trailing her rattling wooden tail
into the jazz-band sunset. . . .
The mountains in a row
set pinnacles of ferocious isolation
under the alien hot heaven
Vegetable cripples of drought
thrust up the parching appeal
cracking open the earth
stump-fingered cacti
and hunch-back palm trees
belabour the cinders of twilight. . . .
Perlun
the whipper snapper child of the sun
His pert blonde spirit
scoured by the Scandinavian Boreas
His head
an adolescent oval
ostrich egg
The victorious silly beauty of his face
awakens to his instincts
A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold
he puts the world
to the test of intuition
Smiling from ear to ear
Living from other hands to mouth
Holding in immaculate arms
the syphilitic sailor
on his avoided death bunk
or the movie vamp
among the muffled shadows of the shrubberies——
Picking lemons in Los Angeles broke
The education of “Prince Fils à Papa”
How low men die
How women love—
The rituals of Dempsey and Carpentier
PERLUN
asks “Do these flappers of the millionaires
think I’m a doll for anyone to pat?”
Poe
a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights
sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights
Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles
sing burial rites
Apology of Genius
Ostracized as we are with God—
The watchers of the civilized wastes
reverse their signals on our track
Lepers of the moon
all magically diseased
we come among you
innocent
of our luminous sores
unknowing
how perturbing lights
our spirit
on the passion of Man
until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces
like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries
We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty
Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws
You may give birth to us