The perfection of that line is beyond cavil. Yet, in the last stanza, this paradigm, this very fine flower of U. S. art is warped out of alignment, obscured in meaning even to the point of an absolute unintelligibility by the inevitable straining after a rhyme, the very cleverness with which this straining is covered being a sinister token in itself.
So we have no choice but to accept the work of this fumbling conjurer.
Upon the Jepson filet Eliot balances his mushroom. It is the latest touch from the literary cuisine, it adds to the pleasant outlook from the club window. If to do this, if to be a Whistler at best, in the art of poetry, is to reach the height of poetic expression then Ezra and Eliot have approached it and tant pis for the rest of us.
The Adobe Indian hag sings her lullaby:
and Kandinsky in his, Ueber das Geistige in der Kunst, sets down the following axioms for the artist:
So we have the fish and the bait, but the last rule holds three hooks at once—not for the fish, however.
I do not overlook De Gourmont’s plea for a meeting of the nations, but I do believe that when they meet Paris will be more than slightly abashed to find parodies of the middle ages, Dante and Langue D’Oc foisted upon it as the best in United States poetry. Even Eliot, who is too fine an artist to allow himself to be exploited by a blockheaded grammaticaster, turns recently toward “one definite false note” in his quatrains, which more nearly approach America than ever La Figlia Que Piange did. Ezra Pound is a Boscan who has met his Navagiero.
One day Ezra and I were walking down a back lane in Wyncote. I contended for bread, he for caviar. I become hot. He, with fine discretion, exclaimed: “Let us drop it. We will never agree, or come to an agreement.” He spoke then like a Frenchman, which is one who discerns.
Imagine an international congress of poets at Paris or Versailles, Remy de Gourmont (now dead) presiding, poets all speaking five languages fluently. Ezra stands up to represent U. S. verse and De Gourmont sits down smiling. Ezra begins by reading, La Figlia Que Piange. It would be a pretty pastime to gather into a mental basket the fruits of that reading from the minds of the ten Frenchmen present; their impressions of the sort of United States that very fine flower was picked from. After this Kreymborg might push his way to the front and read Jack’s House.
E. P. is the best enemy United States verse has. He is interested, passionately interested—even if he doesn’t know what he is talking about. But of course he does know what he is talking about. He does not, however, know everything, not by more than half. The accordances of which Americans have the parts and the colors but not the completions before them pass beyond the attempts of his thought. It is a middle aging blight of the Imagination.
I praise those who have the wit and courage, and the conventionality, to go direct toward their vision of perfection in an objective world where the sign-posts are clearly marked, viz., to London. But confine them in hell for their paretic assumption that there is no alternative but their own groove.
Dear fat Stevens, thawing out so beautifully at forty! I was one day irately damning those who run to London when Stevens caught me up with his mild: “But where in the world will you have them run to?”
Nothing that I should write touching poetry would be complete without Maxwell Bodenheim in it, even had he not said that the Improvisations were “perfect,” the best things I had ever done; for that I place him, Janus, first and last.
Bodenheim pretends to hate most people, including Pound and Kreymborg, but that he really goes to this trouble I cannot imagine. He seems rather to me to have the virtue of self absorbtion so fully developed that hate is made impossible. Due to this, also, he is an unbelievable physical stoic. I know of no one who lives so completely in his pretences as Bogie does. Having formulated his world neither toothache nor the misery to which his indolence reduces him can make head against the force of his imagination. Because of this he remains for me a heroic figure, which, after all, is quite apart from the stuff he writes and which only concerns him. He is an Isaiah of the butterflies.
Bogie was the young and fairly well acclaimed genius when he came to New York four years ago. He pretended to have fallen in Chicago and to have sprained his shoulder. The joint was done up in a proper Sayre’s dressing and there really looked to be a bona fide injury. Of course he couldn’t find any work to do with one hand so we all chipped in. It lasted a month! During that time Bogie spent a week at my house at no small inconvenience to Florence, who had two babies on her hands just then. When he left I expressed my pleasure at having had his company. “Yes,” he replied, “I think you have profited by my visit.” The statement impressed me by its simple accuracy as well as by the evidence it bore of that fullness of the imagination which had held the man in its tide while we had been together.
Charlie Demuth once told me that he did not like the taste of liquor, for which he was thankful, but that he found the effect it had on his mind to be delightful. Of course Li Po is reported to have written his best verse supported in the arms of the Emperor’s attendants and with a dancing-girl to hold his tablet. He was also a great poet. Wine is merely the latchstring.
The virtue of it all is in an opening of the doors, though some rooms of course will be empty, a break with banality, the continual hardening which habit enforces. There is nothing left in me but the virtue of curiosity, Demuth puts in. The poet should be forever at the ship’s prow.
An acrobat seldom learns really a new trick, but he must exercise continually to keep his joints free. When I made this discovery it started rings in my memory that keep following one after the other to this day.
I have placed the following Improvisations in groups, somewhat after the A. B. A. formula, that one may support the other, clarifying or enforcing perhaps the other’s intention.
The arrangement of the notes, each following its poem and separated from it by a ruled line, is borrowed from a small volume of Metastasio, Varie Poesie Dell’ Abate Pietro Metastasio, Venice, 1795.
September 1, 1918
IMPROVISATIONS
IMPROVISATIONS
I.
1
Fools have big wombs. For the rest?—here is pennyroyal if one knows to use it. But time is only another liar, so go along the wall a little further: if blackberries prove bitter there’ll be mushrooms, fairy-ring mushrooms, in the grass, sweetest of all fungi.
2
For what it’s worth: Jacob Louslinger, white haired, stinking, dirty bearded, cross eyed, stammer tongued, broken voiced, bent backed, ball kneed, cave bellied, mucous faced—deathling,—found lying in the weeds “up there by the cemetery”. “Looks to me as if he’d been bumming around the meadows for a couple of weeks”. Shoes twisted into incredible lilies: out at the toes, heels, tops, sides, soles. Meadow flower! ha, mallow! at last I have you. (Rot dead marigolds—an acre at a time! Gold, are you?) Ha, clouds will touch world’s edge and the great pink mallow stand singly in the wet, topping reeds and—a closet full of clothes and good shoes and my-thirty-year’s-master’s-daughter’s two cows for me to care for and a winter room with a fire in it—. I would rather feed pigs in Moonachie and chew calamus root and break crab’s claws at an open fire: age’s lust loose!
3
Talk as you will, say: “No woman wants to bother with children in this country”;—speak of your Amsterdam and the whitest aprons and brightest doorknobs in Christendom. And I’ll answer you: “Gleaming doorknobs and scrubbed entries have heard the songs of the housemaids at sun-up and—housemaids are wishes. Whose? Ha! the dark canals are whistling, whistling for who will cross to the other side. If I remain with hands in pocket leaning upon my lamppost—why—I bring curses to a hag’s lips and her daughter on her arm knows better than I can tell you—best to blush and out with it than back beaten after.
In Holland at daybreak, of a fine spring morning, one sees the housemaids beating rugs before the small houses of such a city as Amsterdam, sweeping, scrubbing the low entry steps and polishing doorbells and doorknobs. By night perhaps there will be an old woman with a girl on her arm, histing and whistling across a deserted canal to some late loiterer trudging aimlessly on beneath the gas lamps.
II.
1
Why go further? One might conceivably rectify the rhythm, study all out and arrive at the perfection of a tiger lily or a china doorknob. One might lift all out of the ruck, be a worthy successor to—the man in the moon. Instead of breaking the back of a willing phrase why not try to follow the wheel through—approach death at a walk, take in all the scenery. There’s as much reason one way as the other and then—one never knows—perhaps we’ll bring back Euridice—this time!
Between two contending forces there may at all times arrive that moment when the stress is equal on both sides so that with a great pushing a great stability results giving a picture of perfect rest. And so it may be that once upon the way the end drives back upon the beginning and a stoppage will occur. At such a time the poet shrinks from the doom that is calling him forgetting the delicate rhythms of perfect beauty, preferring in his mind the gross buffetings of good and evil fortune.
2
Ay dio! I could say so much were it not for the tunes changing, changing, darting so many ways. One step and the cart’s left you sprawling. Here’s the way! and—you’re hip bogged. And there’s blame of the light too: when eyes are humming birds who’ll tie them with a lead string? But it’s the tunes they want most,—send them skipping out at the tree tops. Whistle then! who’ld stop the leaves swarming; curving down the east in their braided jackets? Well enough—but there’s small comfort in naked branches when the heart’s not set that way.
A man’s desire is to win his way to some hilltop. But against him seem to swarm a hundred jumping devils. These are his constant companions, these are the friendly images which he has invented out of his mind and which are inviting him to rest and to disport himself according to hidden reasons. The man being half a poet is cost down and longs to rid himself of his torment and his tormentors.
3
When you hang your clothes on the line you do not expect to see the line broken and them trailing in the mud. Nor would you expect to keep your hands clean by putting them in a dirty pocket. However and of course if you are a market man, fish, cheeses and the like going under your fingers every minute in the hour you would not leave off the business and expect to handle a basket of fine laces without at least mopping yourself on a towel, soiled as it may be. Then how will you expect a fine trickle of words to follow you through the intimacies of this dance without—oh, come let us walk together into the air awhile first. One must be watchman to much secret arrogance before his ways are tuned to these measures. You see there is a dip of the ground between us. You think you can leap up from your gross caresses of these creatures and at a gesture fling it all off and step out in silver to my finger tips. Ah, it is not that I do not wait for you, always! But my sweet fellow—you have broken yourself without purpose, you are—Hark! it is the music! Whence does it come? What! Out of the ground? Is it this that you have been preparing for me? Ha, goodbye, I have a rendez vous in the tips of three birch sisters. Encouragé vos musiciens! Ask them to play faster. I will return—later. Ah you are kind. —and I? must dance with the wind, make my own snow flakes, whistle a contrapuntal melody to my own fuge! Huzza then, this is the dance of the blue moss bank! Huzza then, this is the mazurka of the hollow log! Huzza then, this is the dance of rain in the cold trees.
III.
1
So far away August green as it yet is. They say the sun still comes up o’mornings and it’s harvest moon now. Always one leaf at the peak twig swirling, swirling and apples rotting in the ditch.
2
My wife’s uncle went to school with Amundsen. After he, Amundsen, returned from the south pole there was a Scandinavian dinner, which bored Amundsen like a boyhood friend. There was a young woman at his table, silent and aloof from the rest. She left early and he restless at some impalpable delay apologized suddenly and went off with two friends, his great, lean bulk twitching agilely. One knew why the poles attracted him. Then my wife’s mother told me the same old thing, how a girl in their village jilted him years back. But the girl at the supper! Ah—that comes later when we are wiser and older.
3
What can it mean to you that a child wears pretty clothes and speaks three languages or that its mother goes to the best shops? It means: July has good need of his blazing sun. But if you pick one berry from the ash tree I’d not know it again for the same no matter how the rain washed. Make my bed of witchhazel twigs, said the old man, since they bloom on the brink of winter.
There is neither beginning nor end to the imagination but it delights in its own seasons reversing the usual order at will. Of the air of the coldest room it will seem to build the hottest passions. Mozart would dance with his wife, whistling his own tune to keep the cold away and Villon ceased to write upon his Petit Testament only when the ink was frozen. But men in the direst poverty of the imagination buy finery and indulge in extravagant moods in order to piece out their lack with other matter.
IV.
1
Mamselle Day, Mamselle Day, come back again! Slip your clothes off!—the jingling of those little shell ornaments so deftly fastened—! The streets are turning in their covers. They smile with shut eyes. I have been twice to the moon since supper but she has nothing to tell me. Mamselle come back! I will be wiser this time.
That which is past is past forever and no power of the imagination can bring it back again. Yet inasmuch as there are many lives being lived in the world, by virtue of sadness and regret we are enabled to partake to some small degree of those pleasures we have missed or lost but which others more fortunate than we are in the act of enjoying.
If one should catch me in this state! —wings would go at a bargain. Ah but to hold the world in the hand then— Here’s a brutal jumble. And if you move the stones, see the ants scurry. But it’s queen’s eggs they take first, tax their jaws most. Burrow, burrow, burrow! there’s sky that way too if the pit’s deep enough—so the stars tell us.
It is an obsession of the gifted that by direct onslaught or by some back road of the intention they will win the recognition of the world. Cezanne. And inasmuch as some men have had a bare recognition in their lives the fiction is continued. But the sad truth is that since the imagination is nothing, nothing will come of it. Thus those necessary readjustments of sense which are the everyday affair of the mind are distorted and intensified in these individuals so that they frequently believe themselves to be the very helots of fortune, whereas nothing could be more ridiculous than to suppose this. However their strength will revive if it may be and finding a sweetness on the tongue of which they had no foreknowledge they set to work again with renewed vigor.
2
How smoothly the car runs. And these rows of celery, how they bitter the air—winter’s authentic foretaste. Here among these farms how the year has aged, yet here’s last year and the year before and all years. One might rest here time without end, watch out his stretch and see no other bending than spring to autumn, winter to summer and earth turning into leaves and leaves into earth and—how restful these long beet rows—the caress of the low clouds—the river lapping at the reeds. Was it ever so high as this, so full? How quickly we’ve come this far. Which way is north now? North now? why that way I think. Ah there’s the house at last, here’s April, but—the blinds are down! It’s all dark here. Scratch a hurried note. Slip it over the sill. Well, some other time.
How smoothly the car runs. This must be the road. Queer how a road juts in. How the dark catches among those trees! How the light clings to the canal! Yes there’s one table taken, we’ll not be alone. This place has possibilities. Will you bring her here? Perhaps—and when we meet on the stair, shall we speak, say it is some acquaintance—or pass silent? Well, a jest’s a jest but how poor this tea is. Think of a life in this place, here in these hills by these truck farms. Whose life? Why there, back of you. If a woman laughs a little loudly one always thinks that way of her. But how she bedizens the country-side. Quite an old world glamour. If it were not for—but one cannot have everything. What poor tea it was. How cold it’s grown. Cheering, a light is that way among the trees. That heavy laugh! How it will rattle these branches in six weeks’ time.
3
The frontispiece is her portrait and further on—the obituary sermon: she held the school upon her shoulders. Did she. Well—turn in here then:—we found money in the blood and some in the room and on the stairs. My God I never knew a man had so much blood in his head! —and thirteen empty whisky bottles. I am sorry but those who come this way meet strange company. This is you see death’s canticle.
A young woman who had excelled at intellectual pursuits, a person of great power in her sphere, died on the same night that a man was murdered in the next street, a fellow of very gross behavior. The poet takes advantage of this to send them on their way side by side without making the usual unhappy moral distinctions.
V.
1
Beautiful white corpse of night actually! So the north-west winds of death are mountain sweet after all! All the troubled stars are put to bed now: three bullets from wife’s hand none kindlier: in the crown, in the nape and one lower: three starlike holes among a million pocky pores and the moon of your mouth: Venus, Jupiter, Mars, and all stars melted forthwith into this one good white light over the inquest table,—the traditional moth beating its wings against it—except there are two here. But sweetest are the caresses of the county physician, a little clumsy perhaps—mais—! and the Prosecuting Attorney, Peter Valuzzi and the others, waving green arms of maples to the tinkling of the earliest ragpicker’s bells. Otherwise—: kindly stupid hands, kindly coarse voices, infinitely soothing, infinitely detached, infinitely beside the question, restfully babbling of how, where, why and night is done and the green edge of yesterday has said all it could.
Remorse is a virtue in that it is a stirrer up of the emotions but it is a folly to accept it as a criticism of conduct. So to accept it is to attempt to fit the emotions of a certain state to a preceding state to which they are in no way related. Imagination though it cannot wipe out the sting of remorse can instruct the mind in its proper uses.
2
It is the water we drink. It bubbles under every hill. How? Agh, you stop short of the root. Why, caught and the town goes mad. The haggard husband pirouettes in tights. The wolf-lean wife is rolling butter pats: it’s a clock striking the hour. Pshaw, they do things better in Bangkok,—here too, if there’s heads together. But up and leap at her throat! Bed’s at fault! Yet—I’ve seen three women prostrate, hands twisted in each other’s hair, teeth buried where the hold offered,—not a movement, not a cry more than a low meowling. Oh call me a lady and think you’ve caged me. Hell’s loose every minute, you hear? And the truth is there’s not an eye clapped to either way but someone comes off the dirtier for it. Who am I to wash hands and stand near the wall? I confess freely there’s not a bitch littered in the pound but my skin grows ruddier. Ask me and I’ll say: curfew for the ladies. Bah, two in the grass is the answer to that gesture. Here’s a text for you: Many daughters have done virtuously but thou excellest them all! And so you do, if the manner of a walk means anything. You walk in a different air from the others,—though your husband’s the better man and the charm won’t last a fortnight: the street’s kiss parried again. But give thought to your daughters’ food at mating time, you good men. Send them to hunt spring beauties beneath the sod this winter,—otherwise: hats off to the lady! One can afford to smile.
3
Marry in middle life and take the young thing home. Later in the year let the worst out. It’s odd how little the tune changes. Do worse—till your mind’s turning, then rush into repentence and the lady grown a hero while the clock strikes.
Here the harps have a short cadenza. It’s sunset back of the new cathedral and the purple river scum has set seaward. The car’s at the door. I’d not like to go alone tonight. I’ll pay you well. It’s the kings-evil. Speed! Speed! The sun’s self’s a chancre low in the west. Ha, how the great houses shine—for old time’s sake! For sale! For sale! The town’s gone another way. But I’m not fooled that easily. Fort sale! Fort sale! if you read it aright. And Beauty’s own head on the pillow, à la Muja Desnuda! O Contessa de Alba! Contessa de Alba! Never was there such a lewd wonder in the streets of Newark! Open the windows—but all’s boarded up here. Out with you, you sleepy doctors and lawyers you,—the sky’s afire and Calvary Church with its snail’s horns up, sniffing the dawn—o’ the wrong side! Let the trumpets blare! Tutti i instrumenti! The world’s bound homeward.
A man whose brain is slowly curdling due to a syphilitic infection acquired in early life calls on a friend to go with him on a journey to the city. The friend out of compassion goes, and, thinking of the condition of his unhappy companion, falls to pondering on the sights he sees as he is driven up one street and down another. It being evening he witnesses a dawn of great beauty striking backward upon the world in a reverse direction to the sun’s course and not knowing of what else to think discovers it to be the same power which has led his companion to destruction. At this he is inclined to scoff derisively at the city’s prone stupidity and to make light indeed of his friend’s misfortune.
VI.
1
Of course history is an attempt to make the past seem stable and of course it’s all a lie. Nero must mean Nero or the game’s up. But—though killies have green backs and white bellies, zut! for the bass and hawks! When we’ve tired of swimming we’ll go climb in the ledgy forest. Confute the sages.
2
Quarrel with a purple hanging because it’s no column from the Parthenon. Here’s splotchy velvet set to hide a door in the wall and there—there’s the man himself praying! Oh quarrel whether ’twas Pope Clement raped Persephone or—did the devil wear a mitre in that year? Come, there’s much use in being thin on a windy day if the cloth’s cut well. And oak leaves will not come on maples, nor birch trees either—that is provided—, but pass it over, pass it over.
A woman of good figure, if she be young and gay, welcomes the wind that presses tight upon her from forehead to ankles revealing the impatient mountains and valleys of her secret desire. The wind brings release to her. But the wind is no blessing to all women. At the same time it is idle to quarrel over the relative merits of one thing and another, oak leaves will not come on maples. But there is a deeper folly yet in such quarreling: the perfections revealed by a Rembrandt are equal whether it be question of a laughing Saskia or an old woman cleaning her nails.
3
Think of some lady better than Rackham draws them: mere fairy stuff—some face that would be your face, were you of the right sex, some twenty years back of a still morning, some Lucretia out of the Vatican turned Carmelite, some double image cast over a Titian Venus by two eyes quicker than Titian’s hands were, some strange daughter of an inn-keeper,—some.… Call it a net to catch love’s twin doves and I’ll say to you: Look! and there’ll be the sky there and you’ll say the sky’s blue. Whisk the thing away now? What’s the sky now?
By virtue of works of art the beauty of woman is released to flow whither it will up and down the years. The imagination transcends the thing itself. Kaffirs admire what they term beauty in their women but which is in official parlance a deformity. A Kaffir poet to be a good poet would praise that which is to him praiseworthy and we should be scandalized.
VII.
1
It is still warm enough to slip from the weeds into the lake’s edge, your clothes blushing in the grass and three small boys grinning behind the derelict hearth’s side. But summer is up among the huckleberries near the path’s end and snakes’ eggs lie curling in the sun on the lonely summit. But—well—let’s wish it were higher after all these years staring at it deplore the paunched clouds glimpse the sky’s thin counter-crest and plunge into the gulch. Sticky cobwebs tell of feverish midnights. Crack a rock (what’s a thousand years!) and send it crashing among the oaks! Wind a pine tree in a grey-worm’s net and play it for a trout; oh—but it’s the moon does that! No, summer has gone down the other side of the mountain. Carry home what we can. What have you brought off? Ah here are thimble-berries.
In middle life the mind passes to a variegated October. This is the time youth in its faulty aspirations has set for the achievement of great summits. But having attained the mountain top one is not snatched into a cloud but the descent proffers its blandishments quite as a matter of course. At this the fellow is cast into a great confusion and rather plaintively looks about to see if any has fared better than he.
2
The little Polish Father of Kingsland does not understand, he cannot understand. These are exquisite differences never to be resolved. He comes at midnight through mid-winter slush to baptise a dying newborn; he smiles suavely and shruggs his shoulders: a clear middle A touched by a master—but he cannot understand. And Benny, Sharon, Henrietta, and Josephine, what is it to them? Yet jointly they come more into the way of the music. And white haired Miss Ball! The empty school is humming to her little melody played with one finger at the noon hour but it is beyond them all. There is much heavy breathing, many tight shut lips, a smothered laugh whiles, two laughs cracking together, three together sometimes and then a burst of wind lifting the dust again.
Living with and upon and among the poor, those that gather in a few rooms, sometimes very clean, sometimes full of vermine, there are certain pestilential individuals, priests, school teachers, doctors, commercial agents of one sort or another who though they themselves are full of graceful perfections nevertheless contrive to be so complacent of their lot, floating as they are with the depth of a sea beneath them, as to be worthy only of amused contempt. Yet even to these sometimes there rises that which they think in their ignorance is a confused babble of aspiring voices not knowing what ancient harmonies these are to which they are so faultily listening.
3
What I like best’s the long unbroken line of the hills there. Yes, it’s a good view. Come, let’s visit the orchard. Here’s peaches twenty years on the branch. Not ripe yet!? Why—! Those hills! Those hills! But you’ld be young again! Well, fourteen’s a hard year for boy or girl, let alone one older driving the pricks in, but though there’s more in a song than the notes of it and a smile’s a pretty baby when you’ve none other—let’s not turn backward. Mumble the words, you understand, call them four brothers, strain to catch the sense but have to admit it’s in a language they’ve not taught you, a flaw somewhere,—and for answer: well, that long unbroken line of the hills there.
Two people, an old man and a woman in early middle life, are talking together upon a small farm at which the woman has just arrived on a visit. They have walked to an orchard on the slope of a hill from which a distant range of mountains can be clearly made out. A third man, piecing together certain knowledge he has of the woman with what is being said before him is prompted to give rein to his imagination. This he does and hears many oblique sentences which escape the others.
Coda.
Squalor and filth with a sweet cur nestling in the grimy blankets of your bed and on better roads striplings dreaming of wealth and happiness. Country life in America! The cackling grackle that dartled at the hill’s bottom have joined their flock and swing with the rest over a broken roof toward Dixie.
VIII.
1
Some fifteen years we’ll say I served this friend, was his valet, nurse, physician, fool and master: nothing too menial, to say the least. Enough of that: so.
Stand aside while they pass. This is what they found in the rock when it was cracked open: this fingernail. Hide your face among the lower leaves, here’s a meeting should have led to better things but—it is only one branch out of the forest and night pressing you for an answer! Velvet night weighing upon your eye-balls with gentle insistence; calling you away: Come with me, now, tonight! Come with me! now tonight.…
In great dudgeon over the small profit that has come to him through a certain companionship a poet addresses himself and the loved one as if it were two strangers, thus advancing himself to the brink of that discovery which will reward all his labors but which he as yet only discerns as a night, a dark void coaxing him whither he has no knowledge.
2
You speak of the enormity of her disease, of her poverty. Bah, these are the fiddle she makes tunes on and it’s tunes bring the world dancing to your house-door, even on this swamp side. You speak of the helpless waiting, waiting till the thing squeeze her windpipe shut. Oh, that’s best of all, that’s romance—with the devil himself a hero. No my boy. You speak of her man’s callous stinginess. Yes, my God, how can he refuse to buy milk when it’s alone milk that she can swallow now? But how is it she picks market beans for him day in, day out, in the sun, in the frost? You understand? You speak of so many things, you blame me for my indifference. Well, this is you see my sister and death, great death is robbing her of life. It dwarfs most things.
Filth and vermine though they shock the over-nice are imperfections of the flesh closely related in the just imagination of the poet to excessive cleanliness. After some years of varied experience with the bodies of the rich and the poor a man finds little to distinguish between them, bulks them as one and bases his working judgements on other matters.
3
Hercules is in Hacketstown doing farm labor. Look at his hands if you’ll not believe me. And what do I care if yellow and red are Spain’s riches and Spain’s good blood. Here yellow and red mean simply autumn! The odor of the poor farmer’s fried supper is mixing with the smell of the hemlocks, mist is in the valley hugging the ground and over Parsippany—where an oldish man leans talking to a young woman—the moon is swinging from its star.
IX.
1
Throw that flower in the waste basket, it’s faded. And keep an eye to your shoes and fingernails. The fool you once laughed at has made a fortune! There’s small help in a clutter of leaves either, no matter how they gleam. Punctillio’s the thing. A nobby vest. Spats. Lamps carry far, believe me, in lieu of sunshine!
Despite vastness of frontiers, which are as it were the fringes of a flower full of honey, it is the little things that count! Neglect them and bitterness drowns the imagination.
2
The time never was when he could play more than mattrass to the pretty feet of this woman who had been twice a mother without touching the meager pollen of their marriage intimacy. What more for him than to be a dandelion that could chirp with crickets or do a onestep with snow flakes? The tune is difficult but not impossible to the middle aged whose knees are tethered faster to the mind than they are at eighteen when any wind sets them clacking. What a rhythm’s here! One would say the body lay asleep and the dance escaped from the hair tips, the bleached fuzz that covers back and belly, shoulders, neck and forehead. The dance is diamantine over the sleeper who seems not to breathe! One would say heat over the end of a roadway that turns down hill. Cesa!
One may write music and music but who will dance to it? The dance escapes but the music, the music—projects a dance over itself which the feet follow lazily if at all. So a dance is a thing in itself. It is the music that dances but if there are words then there are two dancers, the words pirouetting with the music.
3
One has emotions about the strangest things: men—women himself the most contemptible. But to struggle with ants for a piece of meat,—a mangy cur to swallow beetles and all—better go slaughter one’s own kind in the name of peace—except when the body’s not there maggots swarm in the corruption. Oh let him have it. Find a cleaner fare for wife and child. To the sick their sick. For us heads bowed over the green-flowered asphodel. Lean on my shoulder little one, you too. I will lead you to fields you know nothing of. There’s small dancing left for us any way you look at it.
A man who enjoyed his food, the company of his children and especially his wife’s alternate caresses and tongue lashings felt his position in the town growing insecure due to a successful business competitor. Being thus stung to the quick he thinks magnanimously of his own methods of dealing with his customers and likens his competitor to a dog that swallows his meat with beetles or maggots upon it, that is, any way so he gets it.
Being thus roused the man does not seek to outdo his rival but grows heavily sad and thinks of death and his lost pleasures thus showing himself to be a person of discernment. For by so doing he gives evidence of a bastard sort of knowledge of that diversity of context in things and situations which the great masters of antiquity looked to for the inspiration and distinction of their compositions.
X.
1
If I could clap this in a cage and let that out we’d see colored wings then to blind the sun but—the good ships are anchored up-stream and the gorged seagulls flap heavily. At sea! At sea! That’s where the waves beat kindliest. But no, singers are beggars or worse cannot man a ship songs are their trade. Ku-whee! Ku-whee! It’s a wind in the lookout’s nest talking of Columbus, whom no sea daunted, Columbus, chained below decks, bound homeward.
They built a replica of Columbus’ flagship the Santa Maria and took it from harbor to harbor along the North Atlantic seaboard. The insignificance of that shell could hardly be exaggerated when comparison was made with even the very least of our present day sea-going vessels. Thus was the magnificence of enterprise and the hardihood of one Christopher Columbus celebrated at this late date.
2
You would learn—if you knew even one city—where people are a little gathered together and where one sees—it’s our frontier you know—the common changes of the human spirit: our husbands tire of us and we—let us not say we go hungry for their caresses but for caresses—of a kind. Oh I am no prophet. I have no theory to advance, except that it’s well nigh impossible to know the wish till after. Cross the room to him if the whim leads that way. Here’s drink of an eye that calls you. No need to take the thing too seriously. It’s something of a will-o-the-whisp I acknowledge. All in the pressure of an arm—through a fur coat often. Something of a dancing light with the rain beating on a cab window. Here’s nothing to lead you astray. What? Why you’re young still. Your children? Yes, there they are. Desire skates like a Hollander as well as runs pickaninny fashion. Really, there’s little more to say than: flowers in a glass basket under the electric glare; the carpet is red, mostly, a hodge-podge of zig-zags that pass for Persian fancies. Risk a double entendre. But of a sudden the room’s not the same! It’s a strange blood sings under some skin. Who will have the sense for it? The men sniff suspiciously; you at least my dear had your head about you. It was a tender nibble but it really did you credit. But think of what might be! It’s all in the imagination. I give you no more credit than you deserve, you will never rise to it, never be more than a rose dropped in the river—but acknowledge that there is, ah there is a— You are such a clever knitter. Your hands please. Ah, if I had your hands.
A woman of marked discernment finding herself among strange companions wishes for the hands of one of them and inasmuch as she feels herself refreshed by the sight of these perfections she offers in return those perfections of her own which appear to her to be most appropriate to the occasion.
3
Truth’s a wonder. What difference is it how the best head we have greets his first born these days? What weight has it that the bravest hair of all’s gone waiting on cheap tables or the most garrulous lives lonely by a bad neighbor and has her south windows pestered with caterpillars? The nights are long for lice combing or moon dodging—and the net comes in empty again. Or there’s been no fish in this ford since Christian was a baby. Yet up surges the good zest and the game’s on. Follow at my heels, there’s little to tell you you’ld think a stoopsworth. You’ld pick the same faces in a crowd no matter what I’d say. And you’ld be right too. The path’s not yours till you’ve gone it alone a time. But here’s another handful of west wind. White of the night! White of the night. Turn back till I tell you a puzzle: What is it in the stilled face of an old mender-man and winter not far off and a darky parts his wool, and wenches wear of a Sunday? It’s a sparrow with a crumb in his beak dodging wheels and clouds crossing two ways.
Virtue is not to be packed in a bag and carried off to the rag mill. Perversions are righted and the upright are reversed, then the stream takes a bend upon itself and the meaning turns a livid purple and drops down in a whirlpool without so much as fraying a single fibre.
XI.
1
Why pretend to remember the weather two years back? Why not? Listen close then repeat after others what they have just said and win a reputation for vivacity. Oh feed upon petals of aedelweis! one dew drop, if it be from the right flower, is five year’s drink!
Having once taken the plunge the situation that preceded it becomes obsolete which a moment before was alive with malignant rigidities.
2
When beldams dig clams their fat hams (it’s always beldams) balanced near Tellus’ hide, this rhinoceros pelt, these lumped stones—buffoonery of midges on a bull’s thigh—invoke,—what you will: birth’s glut, awe at God’s craft, youth’s poverty, evolution of a child’s caper, man’s poor inconsequence. Eclipse of all things; sun’s self turned hen’s rump.
3
Cross a knife and fork and listen to the church bells! It is the harvest moon’s made wine of our blood. Up over the dark factory into the blue glare start the young poplars. They whisper: It is Sunday! It is Sunday! But the laws of the county have been stripped bare of leaves. Out over the marshes flickers our laughter. A lewd anecdote’s the chase. On through the vapory heather! And there at banter’s edge the city looks at us sidelong with great eyes,—lifts to its lips heavenly milk! Lucina, O Lucina! beneficent cow, how have we offended thee?
Hilariously happy because of some obscure wine of the fancy which they have drunk four rollicking companions take delight in the thought that they have thus evaded the stringent laws of the county. Seeing the distant city bathed in moonlight and staring seriously at them they liken the moon to a cow and its light to milk.
XII.
1
The browned trees are singing for my thirty-fourth birthday. Leaves are beginning to fall upon the long grass. Their cold perfume raises the anticipation of sensational revolutions in my unsettled life. Violence has begotten peace, peace has fluttered away in agitation. A bewildered change has turned among the roots and the Prince’s kiss as far at sea as ever.
To each age as to each person its perfections. But in these things there is a kind of revolutionary sequence. So that a man having lain at ease here and advanced there as time progresses the order of these things becomes inverted. Thinking to have brought all to one level the man finds his foot striking through where he had thought rock to be and stands firm where he had experienced only a bog hitherto. At a loss to free himself from bewilderment at this discovery he puts off the caress of the imagination.
2
The trick is never to touch the world anywhere. Leave yourself at the door, walk in, admire the pictures, talk a few words with the master of the house, question his wife a little, rejoin yourself at the door—and go off arm in arm listening to last week’s symphony played by angel hornsmen from the benches of a turned cloud. Or if dogs rub too close and the poor are too much out let your friend answer them.
The poet being sad at the misery he has beheld that morning and seeing several laughing fellows approaching puts himself in their way in order to hear what they are saying. Gathering from their remarks that it is of some sharp business by which they have all made an inordinate profit, he allows his thoughts to play back upon the current of his own life. And imagining himself to be two persons he eases his mind by putting his burdens upon one while the other takes what pleasure there is before him.
Something to grow used to; a stone too big for ox haul, too near for blasting. Take the road round it or—scrape away, scrape away: a mountain’s buried in the dirt! Marry a gopher to help you! Drive her in! Go yourself down along the lit pastures. Down, down. The whole family take shovels, babies and all! Down, down! Here’s Tenochtitlan! here’s a strange Darien where worms are princes.
3
But for broken feet beating, beating on worn flagstones I would have danced to my knees at the fiddle’s first run. But here’s evening and there they scamper back of the world chasing the sun round! And it’s daybreak in Calcutta! So lay aside, let’s draw off from the town and look back awhile. See, there it rises out of the swamp and the mists already blowing their sleepy bagpipes.
Often a poem will have merit because of some one line or even one meritorious word. So it hangs heavily on its stem but still secure, the tree unwilling to release it.
XIII.
1
Their half sophisticated faces gripe me in the belly. There’s no business to be done with them either way. They’re neither virtuous nor the other thing, between which exist no perfections. Oh, the mothers will explain that they are good girls. But these never guess that there’s more sense in a sentence heard backward than forward most times. A country whose flowers are without perfume and whose girls lack modesty—the saying goes—. Dig deeper mon ami, the rock maidens are running naked in the dark cellars.
In disgust at the spectacle of an excess of ripe flesh that, in accordance with the local custom of the place he is in, will be left to wither without ever achieving its full enjoyment, a young man of the place consoles himself with a vision of perfect beauty.
2
I’ll not get it no matter how I try. Say it was a girl in black I held open a street door for. Let it go at that. I saw a man an hour earlier I liked better much better. But it’s not so easy to pass over. Perfection’s not a thing you’ll let slip so easily. What a body! The little flattened buttocks; the quiver of the flesh under the smooth fabric! Agh, it isn’t that I want to go to bed with you. In fact what is there to say? except the mind’s a queer nereid sometimes and flesh is at least as good a gauze as words are: something of that. Something of mine—yours—hearts on sleaves? Ah zut what’s the use? It’s not that I’ve lost her again either. It’s hard to tell loss from gain anyway.
3
The words of the thing twang and twitter to the gentle rocking of a high-laced boot and the silk above that. The trick of the dance is in following now the words, allegro, now the contrary beat of the glossy leg: Reaching far over as if—But always she draws back and comes down upon the word flatfooted. For a moment we—but the boot’s costly and the play’s not mine. The pace leads off anew. Again the words break it and we both comes down flatfooted. Then—near the knee, jumps to the eyes, catching in the hair’s shadow. But the lips take the rhythm again and again we come down flatfooted. By this time boredom takes a hand and the play’s ended.
XIV.
1
The brutal Lord of All will rip us from each other—leave the one to suffer here alone. No need belief in god or hell to postulate that much. The dance: hands touching, leaves touching—eyes looking, clouds rising—lips touching, cheeks touching, arms about … Sleep. Heavy head, heavy arm, heavy dream—: Of Ymir’s flesh the earth was made and of his thoughts were all the gloomy clouds created. Oya!
Out of bitterness itself the clear wine of the imagination will be pressed and the dance prosper thereby.
2
To you! whoever you are, wherever you are! (But I know where you are!) There’s Durer’s “Nemesis” naked on her sphere over the little town by the river—except she’s too old. There’s a dancing burgess by Tenier and Villon’s maitress—after he’d gone bald and was shin pocked and toothless: she that had him ducked in the sewage drain. Then there’s that miller’s daughter of “buttocks broad and breastes high”. Something of Nietzsche, something of the good Samaritan, something of the devil himself,—can cut a caper of a fashion, my fashion! Hey you, the dance! Squat. Leap. Hips to the left. Chin—ha!—sideways! Stand up, stand up ma bonne! you’ll break my backbone. So again! —and so forth till we’re sweat soaked.
Some fools once were listening to a poet reading his poem. It so happened that the words of the thing spoke of gross matters of the everyday world such as are never much hidden from a quick eye. Out of these semblances, and borrowing certain members from fitting masterpieces of antiquity, the poet began piping up his music, simple fellow, thinking to please his listeners. But they getting the whole matter sadly muddled in their minds made such a confused business of listening that not only were they not pleased at the poet’s exertions but no sooner had he done than they burst out against him with violent imprecations.
3
It’s all one. Richard worked years to conquer the descending cadence, idiotic sentimentalist. Ha, for happiness! This tore the dress in ribbons from her maid’s back and not spared the nails either; wild anger spit from her pinched eyes! This is the better part. Or a child under a table to be dragged out coughing and biting, eyes glittering evilly. I’ll have it my way! Nothing is any pleasure but misery and brokeness. THIS is the only up-cadence. This is where the secret rolls over and opens its eyes. Bitter words spoken to a child ripple in morning light! Boredom from a bedroom doorway thrills with anticipation! The complaints of an old man dying piecemeal are starling chirrups. Coughs go singing on springtime paths across a field; corruption picks strawberries and slow warping of the mind, blacking the deadly walls—counted and recounted—rolls in the grass and shouts ecstatically. All is solved! The moaning and dull sobbing of infants sets blood tingling and eyes ablaze to listen. Speed sings in the heels at long nights tossing on coarse sheets with burning sockets staring into the black. Dance! Sing! Coil and uncoil! Whip yourselves about! Shout the deliverence! An old woman has infected her blossomy grand-daughter with a blood illness that every two weeks drives the mother into hidden songs of agony, the pad-footed mirage of creeping death for music. The face muscles keep pace. Then a darting about the compass in a tarantelle that wears flesh from bones. Here is dancing! The mind in tatters. And so the music wistfully takes the lead. Aye de mi, Juana la Loca, reina de Espagna, esa esta tu canta, reina mia!
XV.
1
’N! cha! cha! cha! destiny needs men, so make up your mind. Here’s an oak filling the wind’s space. Out with him!
By carefully prepared stages come down through the vulgarities of a cupiscent girlhood to the barren distinction of this cold six A. M. Her pretty, pinched face is a very simple tune but it carries now a certain quasi-maidenly distinction. It’s not at least what you’d have heard six years back when she was really virgin.
Often when the descent seems well marked there will be a subtle ascent over-ruling it so that in the end when the degradation is fully anticipated the person will be found to have emerged upon a hilltop.
2
Such an old sinner knows the lit-edged clouds. No spring days like those that come in October. Strindberg had the eyes for Swan White! So make my bed with yours, tomorrow…? Tomorrow … the hospital.
Seeing his life at an end a miserable fellow, much accustomed to evil, wishes for the companionship of youth and beauty before he dies and in exchange thinks to proffer that praise which due to the kind of life he has led he is most able to give.
3
Here’s a new sort of April clouds: whiffs of dry snow on the polished roadway that, curled by the wind, lie in feathery figures. Oh but April’s not to be hedged that simply. She was a Scotch lady and made her own butter and they grew their own rye. It was the finest bread I ever tasted. And how we used to jump in the hay! When he lost his money she kept a boarding house.… But this is nothing to the story that should have been written could he have had time to jot it all down: of how Bertha’s lips are turned and her calf also and how she weighs 118 pounds. Do I think that is much? Hagh! And her other perfections. Ruin the girl? Oh there are fifty niceties that—being virtuous, oh glacially virtuous—one might consider, i.e. whose touch is the less venomous and by virtue of what sanction? Love, my good friends has never held sway in more than a heart or two here and there since—? All beauty stands upon the edge of the deflowering. I confess I wish my wife younger. This is the lewdest thought possible: it makes mockery of the spirit, say you? Solitary poet who speaks his mind and has not one fellow in a virtuous world! I wish for youth! I wish for love—! I see well what passes in the street and much that passes in the mind. You’ll say this has nothing in it of chastity. Ah well, chastity is a lily of the valley that only a fool would mock. There is no whiter nor no sweeter flower—but once past, the rankest stink comes from the soothest petals. Heigh-ya! A crib from our mediæval friend Shakespeare.
That which is heard from the lips of those to whom we are talking in our day’s-affairs mingles with what we see in the streets and everywhere about us as it mingles also with our imaginations. By this chemistry is fabricated a language of the day which shifts and reveals its meaning as clouds shift and turn in the sky and sometimes send down rain or snow or hail. This is the language to which few ears are tuned so that it is said by poets that few men are ever in their full senses since they have no way to use their imaginations. Thus to say that a man has no imagination is to say nearly that he is blind or deaf. But of old poets would translate this hidden language into a kind of replica of the speech of the world with certain distinctions of rhyme and meter to show that it was not really that speech. Nowadays the elements of that language are set down as heard and the imagination of the listener and of the poet are left free to mingle in the dance.
XVI.
1
Per le pillole d’Ercole! I should write a happy poem tonight. It would have to do with a bare, upstanding fellow whose thighs bulge with a zest for—say, a zest! He tries his arm. Flings a stone over the river. Scratches his bare back. Twirls his beard, laughs softly and stretches up his arms in a yawn. —stops in the midst—looking! A white flash over against the oak stems! Draws in his belly. Looks again. In three motions is near the stream’s middle, swinging forward, hugh, hugh, hugh, hugh, blinking his eyes against the lapping wavelets! Out! and the sting of the thicket!
The poet transforms himself into a satyr and goes in pursuit of a white skinned dryad. The gaiety of his mood full of lustihood, even so, turns back with a mocking jibe.
2
Giants in the dirt. The gods, the Greek gods, smothered in filth and ignorance. The race is scattered over the world. Where is its home? Find it if you’ve the genius. Here Hebe with a sick jaw and a cruel husband,—her mother left no place for a brain to grow. Herakles rowing boats on Berry’s Creek! Zeus is a country doctor without a taste for coin jingling. Supper is of a bastard nectar on rare nights for they will come—the rare nights! The ground lifts and out sally the heroes of Sophocles, of Æschylus. They go seeping down into our hearts, they rain upon us and in the bog they sink again down through the white roots, down—to a saloon back of the rail-road switch where they have that girl, you know, the one that should have been Venus by the lust that’s in her. They’ve got her down there among the railroad men. A crusade couldn’t rescue her. Up to jail—or call it down to Limbo—the Chief of Police our Pluto. It’s all of the gods, there’s nothing else worth writing of. They are the same men they always were—but fallen. Do they dance now, they that danced beside Helicon? They dance much as they did then, only, few have an eye for it, through the dirt and fumes.
When they came to question the girl before the local judge it was discovered that there were seventeen men more or less involved so that there was nothing to do but to declare the child a common bastard and send the girl about her business. Her mother took her in and after the brat died of pneumonia a year later she called in the police one day. An officer opened the bedroom door. The girl was in bed with an eighteenth fellow, a young roaming loafer with a silly grin to his face. They forced a marriage which relieved the mother of her burden. The girl was weak minded so that it was only with the greatest difficulty that she could cover her moves, in fact she never could do so with success.
3
Homer sat in a butcher’s shop one rainy night and smelt fresh meat near him so he moved to the open window. It is infinitely important that I do what I well please in the world. What you please is that I please what you please but what I please is well rid of you before I turn off from the path into the field. What I am, why that they made me. What I do, why that I choose for myself. Reading shows, you say. Yes, reading shows reading. What you read is what they think and what they think is twenty years old or twenty thousand and it’s all one to the little girl in the pissoir. Likewise to me. But the butcher was a friendly fellow so he took the carcass outside thinking Homer to be no more than any other beggar.
A man’s carcass has no more distinction than the carcass of an ox.
XVII.
1
Little round moon up there—wait awhile—do not walk so quickly. I could sing you a song—: Wine clear the sky is and the stars no bigger than sparks! Wait for me and next winter we’ll build a fire and shake up twists of sparks out of it and you shall see yourself in the ashes, young—as you were one time.
It has always been the fashion to talk about the moon.
2
This that I have struggled against is the very thing I should have chosen—but all’s right now. They said I could not put the flower back into the stem nor win roses upon dead briars and I like a fool believed them. But all’s right now. Weave away, dead fingers, the darkies are dancing in Mayaguez—all but one with the sore heel and sugar cane will soon be high enough to romp through. Haia! leading over the ditches, with your skirts flying and the devil in the wind back of you—no one else. Weave away and the bitter tongue of an old woman is eating, eating, eating venomous words with thirty years mould on them and all shall be eaten back to honeymoon’s end. Weave and pangs of agony and pangs of loneliness are beaten backward into the love kiss, weave and kiss recedes into kiss and kisses into looks and looks into the heart’s dark—and over again and over again and time’s pushed ahead in spite of all that. The petals that fell bearing me under are lifted one by one. That which kissed my flesh for priest’s lace so that I could not touch it—weave and you have lifted it and I am glimpsing light chinks among the notes! Backward, and my hair is crisp with purple sap and the last crust’s broken.
A woman on the verge of growing old kindles in the mind of her son a certain curiosity which spinning upon itself catches the woman herself in its wheel, stripping from her the accumulations of many harsh years and shows her at last full of an old time suppleness hardly to have been guessed by the stiffened exterior which had held her fast till that time.
3
Once again the moon in a glassy twilight. The gas jet in the third floor window is turned low, they have not drawn the shade, sends down a flat glare upon the lounge’s cotton-Persian cover where the time passes with clumsy caresses. Never in this millieu has one stirred himself to turn up the light. It is costly to leave a jet burning at all. Feel your way to the bed. Drop your clothes on the floor and creep in. Flesh becomes so accustomed to the touch she will not even waken. And so hours pass and not a move. The room too falls asleep and the street outside falls mumbling into a heap of black rags morning’s at seven—
Seeing a light in an upper window the poet by means of the power he has enters the room and of what he sees there brews himself a sleep potion.