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Against This Age

Chapter 16: DECADENT CRY[A]
By Maxwell Bodenheim
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Poetry

About This Book

A collection of poems that probes urban modernity, loneliness, and aesthetic decadence through vivid imagery and jagged rhythms. Voices shift between intimate monologue, ironic portraiture, and brisk city scenes to examine alienation, desire, and the artist’s uneasy stance within commodified life. Nighttime and street settings recur, juxtaposing glamour and squalor, while playful language alternates with moral heat and satire. Short character studies, conversational pieces, and formal experiments combine into a varied sequence that interrogates social manners, mortality, and the imagination’s attempts to resist conformity.

DECADENT CRY[A]

Hill-flowers salute his feet
Upon the upward slant of a path.
His destination does not matter.
His legs divide the spacious tragedy
Of distance into the small translation
Of steps, and with their aid he reaches
The fraudulent temple of a pause or end.
Hill-flowers, important and unprejudiced,
Bow to this monster-clown.
His feet, ridiculous and neat,
Do not stop, for they must ape
A certainty and hasten to attack
Or praise fixed idols made by flesh and mind.
Hill-flowers, trimly polished
Devices hailing preciosity;
Rumpled by the wind
To scores of original caprices;
Bearing the transfigured skirmish
Of spiritual moods that men call color;
Swiftly and unassumingly
Deaf to lusts and traditions—
They are not regarded
By the men who walk, flat-footed,
Or with scholarly exactitude,
In chase of an ardent chicanery
Known as flesh, and elderly
Quibbles of mind and emotion.
Only an intellect clad in sprightly chiffon
Can spy the importance of flowers on a hill.

[A] Dedicated to a rare moment of intelligence on the part of The Dial.