And odorous with water. When there’s less time
(My life, my work, my hopes!) every step leads to an assignation.
It’s the élan of café life on a hot night,
The street that’s full of modern love-talk, like a room,
It’s the jade-breath of the waterjar…that is mortality
For the blood that is too insolent for work.
Hypnos and Warm Winters
Europe is all steam and leaves and love-affairs!
Old streets – they’re bathrooms of steam and water
Where Hypnos follows me all day in a silk dressing-gown,
Like two old bores we move through the great months of rain.
Suppose I’m coming from my love-affair…
While the steam-heated rain pours down,
And yawning takes the wax and starch out of my skin,
It’s the last straw having to describe the night
Again in detail to my heart – as if it wasn’t there,
When Hypnos, like a twentieth-century bachelor
Bored easily, is lying full length on my bed
– With the effrontery to add to his art the spice
Of fanning me to sleep – with sheets of my own verse.
Escape!
It is among the bins and dormitories of cities
Where the busker wins his bread
By turning music on a spit, and the heavens
Have the dirt of the great sty upon their sides,
That one goes to gormandise upon Escape!
Where alleys are so narrow that the Fates
Like meatporters can scarcely pass
With their awkward burden in its muslin bandages,
And carry off the rabble safely to their graves;
Where every shadow opens a bordel
At sunset, as decay moves
Into cloakrooms of blue velvet in red cheese;
These are the last of the great kitchens!
And your soul knows half the flavour
Lies underfoot in dirty flagstones,
When like a chef it makes a point of bringing in
To show before you dine – Escape,
Still active in a net,
Auroras, icy champagnes upon its wings!
Story of a Hotel Room
Thinking we were safe – insanity!
We went in to make love. All the same
Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.
Then in the gloom…
…And who does not know that pair of shutters
With the awkward hook on them
All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom
We set about acquiring one another
Urgently! But on a temporary basis
Only as guests – just guests of one another’s senses.
But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing
Because the bed of cold, electric linen
Happens to be illicit….
To make love as well as that is ruinous.
Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us
That without permanent intentions
You have absolutely no protection
– If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,
The concurring deep love of the heart
Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.
Bedouin of the London Evening
Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms
Great city, filled with wind and dust!
Bedouin of the London evening,
On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.
And like a medium who falls into a trance
So deep, she can be scratched to death
By her Familiar – at its leisure!
I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown
While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.
I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown
My private modern life has gone to waste.
Boy in the Lane
in search of origin
This lane at zenith; when its hair is warm.
Here’s the magician with his Pedigree of Snouts
Whose ransack shimmers after him.
And here’s the lair in music trousseau where his lout’s
Foot beat out a bright bed. The Atlas stuffs his shoes
With tussore. A dark animal
Pulls August out of the hedge, the linctus dropping as it chews,
Eyes him with the clear gog of Lucifer, the edible
Hot silk of the dream pasture in its mouth.
Geography lays eggs and pearls.
Thirst! And the ceiling advances with luminous hulls.
Panes of weather are left flashing in the path;
Quagmarks of angels in the mud,
The blue thrash of the Jesus fairy. And the youth
Detonates this spoor to drive the Magnifico in thud
And glare of blades against his ear;
The heavenly quops vamped by the tender oilskin of the drum!
His breast reports the code, as a snake dines off some rare
Tattoo its literate satin muscle cannot name.
Archbrute of quadrillion Kingbeats!
But the north flies a magnetic blue roan cloud
Whose touchwaters on the scented dirt of the sphere
Set – in jay’s wing fathoms. And Mud
Looks up through this aquarium of rain, from her
Queasy seance under the grope of the great knotted lips
Of riverpike, whose tarnished flesh
Drinks the umber hangings of the bottom. This boy who clips
Himself a Dynasty of Wings – is hers! Hers to the ghost rash
On his lily-clapping vellum, that strokes her lie to death.
Fog Peacocks
We were the city’s young, and our veins
If they ran pale from the bad food
Even so they carried the infernos of its moods,
For we were the children of the rotting peacock
Of a passer-by, seen in a mist of scorching bitumen.
Oh you bound homeward when the cloud
Of gold gas shone behind the house,
With a captured insect, once half Helium
Now only spurs and gauze,
And the green liquor pool in jars of glass…
We were not less whose city like an alcohol
Spoke hotly to the artery; and we already
Knew love’s streets – where at the fall
Of thermal, phosphorescent dusk
There is a drop that goes down sheer to Hell.
Those evenings you were mutinous
Against the tyranny of kitchen tables where
The flat iron cools its mirror of blue ore
And grip of hot rag,
And the old blanket smokes like humus,
We were the young, derisive metropolitans
Soon to be mashed flat as a wet coalsack by skies
Of ochre, full of malice, coating the trees with emulsion,
And you would have to drag for our disgust in sewers,
And break the cobwebs reaching an illusion.
Poet as Gambler
Now like a gambler on an errand
Of my wasted youth, when gutter and heavens
Were my lottery, and my estate
A shirt of water-lotus that the night wind
Loved to rock as I went to do my gambling
Alone at dusk in the dark city
To out-bid Eternity – with nothing
But a blouse of lilies flooding my lapel
A wallet stuffed with fever for my stake,
All night until the early hours when stowaways
Will grope for the unknown and illustrate
Their clothes with lustrous bruises as they go aboard
And all the ropes and fabrics of a boat
Are heavy with cold nectars in the dawn,
Creation, glimmering and surly underfoot,
And Egypt drowsy on a cake of opium,
I went with nothing but the shirt upon my back
To cast lots with the Infinite,
And my bid was the blouse that rocks
On gamblers with a linen sail all night.
Apprentice
to the lane, the zephyr, and the east.
There is no scholarship to lane and zephyr
Like a boorish, pampered youth!
I have no documents to hawk – sinner and loafer
In the airy darkness – but on a London night
When boats lie up with jewelled nostrils, and under
Sheets of dust and satin, water is in slumber,
Inquire of my ability to be last off the streets
When I am molten, stupid, dangerous,
Under an alley’s aspic wall with bullying confederates
In arms, love, lies, and law-breakings.
And for my knowledge of the dawn
Examine me upon the solitary power-drunk return
From the nocturnal city; walking when the world
Is marvellous, upon a country road
My boot – that’s plump with mildew and uncorseted –
The first to tread the lane when it is dug out
Fresh and dripping from the ether, and the spade
Laid by – heavenly crust still luminous upon it!
Delinquent! with bedlam’s pulses sobbing in my limbs
And tomorrow – all gold bruises
On the rise! Test me (while I am fresh from sins
And villainy) upon the conduct of the zephyr
At the hour he leaves the atmosphere to join the finches
In the path, and wash his fresh wings in the dust.
You, who would tame with toolbag or certificate
My shudder…as the east
Drinks diamonds, and the world’s born blazing underfoot!
Surgeon and robber learn their touch in the great city,
But I am after heavenly spoil, and it is
As a gloveless trespasser that I desire supremacy.
Blouson Noir
And the revolutionary – half-drugged by the wet trees
In Paris in low spirits moves on
Through the scent-kilns full of gnats
He’ll be ruined – his throat rots with happiness.
They’re dirty like a lodging-house, the waterfronts,
But the dust is seductive to him
The jasmine atmosphere and hot drip of the thunder
That crushes Paris bone by bone.
Zut! He can hear modern life going on!
Who lives off the sight of a Paris street!
Down here, it’s dark as a medicine,
It’s April – everything anointed and caked.
And his malaise is fabulous.…
The dirt beds of the trees and the hot dust!
It’s lethal to patrol here, brainsick and odious,
On the alluring quays he’s rotten with happiness.
Bedouin of the London Morning
We come into the café at dawn,
There are waterfogs, and civilisation is white
…if you knew the exotic disgust that grips me
After another bestial night
As we come in, broken; dark with inks and dusts and gases
Like those whose private apartment is the street.
After an all-night conversation
When the street-wind hangs on snarling to your coat,
If you knew my (half erotic) convulsion of loathing
For the night. (I’m like a sleeper
When his mouth is stopped up
By some terrible mud-crust the dream has crammed there
And the soul goes pressing up against
Trying to scream with hydrophobia – and can only murmur.
Some love-thought turns his mouth to blood with longing
Only a moment later.) In the workman’s café
If you knew the almost voluptuous sense of frustration
When you’re broken… And the morning’s alcoholic as a lily.
April and the Ideas-Merchant
I was plying my trade in the street,
It was a rainy agate twilight
And my eyes were half lid…but my town-bred soul
Was tempted and within an inch of giving in.
I was at work upon a suburb of my brain,
An ultra-treacherous idea was in its private room there
And I was closing in – with the ink streaming off my brow!
But my soul attentive to the agate oxygen.
Crates of glass and water had been dumped down by the weather,
– A whole civilisation was loose, bully and vixen
Moving along, roasting hot, ready for anything!
And – odium – I was in the chien-loup
Of the Latin Quarter of my brain
Where certain dark yellow hours go by
…that lead off surreptitiously into eternity.
Academic! Hack! Vulgarian!
You mistook the nature of your calling. Poets are only at work,
With an agate daylight going through the street,
When they live, dream, bleed – within an inch of giving in to art.
On the advantage of being ill-treated by the World
I have a quarrel with the world
At music in my breast
To walk the shabby thrilling twilight of the street
And to be stewed in fogs that stick
To me, as a tramp’s nest
All lice and dews, sticks to his clothes…
Rouses my soul to beat the velvet sinews
Of her thickets! To bear
Old toothmarks bitten deep into my side
Where January can always fit his blade
And halve me with the saw
Again, like sorcerers, while living…
Goads my invisible to cuff her instrument
My breast! To stoop and grow
Hard callouses where the black weather
Rests its knuckles on me like a sulky Pasha
Upon the brow
Of his pet slave, grating magnificent rings…
Makes my tenant thunder my complaint
Upon her velvet ropes!
And yet…as powerful but indolent composers
Will only work when bailiffs pound their doors,
Where my musician lodges
I need Adversity to break its claws!
Iliad of Broken Sentences
(1967)
Since the publication of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms Rosemary Tonks has moved steadily forward in her search for a diction which allows the material objects, the sensibility, and the humour of today to be incorporated naturally inside the framework of a visionary modern lyric. Her poetry has a dramatic but spontaneous texture, enabling it to carry vast and timeless themes lightly within it; and by qualifying and nourishing these themes with contemporary experience she gains for them new emotional, visual, and moral dimensions. The deserts of the Middle-East are again equated with city life; and this is a handbook to its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, pork-filled newspapers – and to its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.
Jacket note, Iliad of Broken Sentences (The Bodley Head, 1967)
The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas
I have lived it, and lived it,
My nervous, luxury civilisation,
My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.
…Their idea of literature is hopeless.
Make them drink their own poetry!
Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.
It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he
Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here
And digs himself into the sofa.
He stays there up to two
hours in the hole – and talks
– Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything
It’s……damnably depressing.
(That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning
In the little dish… And when he calls out: ‘Ha!’
Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)
On my bad days (and I’m being broken
At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he
Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,
Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw.…
I grow coarser; and more modern (I, who am driven mad
By my ideas; who go nowhere;
Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)
All right. I admit everything, everything!
Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)
He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill
At the last minute; and they specially fly in
A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her
With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!
He wants to help her with her arias!
No, I…go to the cinema,
I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street
Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum.
…the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas
Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,