jes a slaight misdemeanor”
Thus Mr A. Little or perhaps Mr Nelson, or Washington
reflecting on the vagaries of our rising natural law
I love therefore I am, and in just that proportion
the end of an era
sitting amid the spoils of Finlandia
a good deal of polar white
but the gas cut off
Debussy preferred his playing
that also was an era
an era of croissants
then an era of rolls made with milk
and the eucalyptus bobble is missing
“Eat bread, son!”
that was an era also, and Spanish bread
was made out of grain in that era
I age
but I love
Madri’, Sevilla, Córdoba,
there was grain equally in the bread of that era
I age but I love
milk in his cheese
(and the mortal fatigue of action postponed)
Do they sell such old brass still
with the wind coming hot off the marsh land
or with death-chill from the mountains?
Nothing but death,
is irreparable
the blind man intelligence bright Persephone
Still hath his mind entire
But to lose faith in a possible collaboration
To raise up the ivory wall
or to stand as the coral rises,
as the pilot-fish nears it
(will they shoot X ——— y)
or the whale-mouth for wanting a northern league
for demanding a Scandinavian Norse coalition
inexorable
this is from heaven
the warp
and the woof
with a sky wet as ocean
flowing with liquid slate
Pétain defended Verdun
was defending a bidet
the red and white stripes
cut clearer against the slate
than against any other distance
the blue field melts with the cloud-flow
To communicate and then stop, that is the
law of discourse
To go far and come to an end
simple in neatness, as the hair of Circe
perhaps without the neatness
as the difference between the title page
and some of the elegant fancy work
they say she could draw down birds from the trees,
that indeed was imperial; but made hell in
the palace
as some say : a dark forest
the warp and the woof
that is of heaven
“and I be damned” said Confucius:
This affair of a southern Nancy
and as for the vagaries of our friend
a few more of him,
were that conceivable, would have enriched
the life of Manhattan
or any other town or metropolis
the texts of his early stuff are probably lost
with the loss of fly-by-night periodicals
and our knowledge
the lost legion
They just died They died because they
just couldn’t stand it
“looked like a withered berry”
20 years after
Whitman liked oysters
at least I think it was oysters
and the clouds have made a pseudo-Vesuvius
this side of
who will have the succession?
To this whiteness,
“What shall add to this whiteness?”
and as to poor Benito
one had a safety-pin
one had a bit of string, one had a button
all of them so far beneath him
half-baked and amateur
or mere scoundrels
To sell their country for half a million
hoping to cheat more out of the people
bought the place from the concierge
who could not deliver
but on the other hand emphasis
an error or excess of
emphasis
the problem after any revolution is what to do with
your gunmen
as old Billyum found out in Oireland
in the Senate, Bedad! or before then
Your gunmen tread on my dreams
O woman shapely as a swan,
Your gunmen tread on my dreams
Whoi didn’t he
keep on writing poetry at that voltage
“Whenever you get hold of one of their banknotes
(i.e. an Ulster note) burn it”
said one of the senators
planning the conquest of Ulster
This he said in the Oirish Senate
showing a fine grasp of . . .
of possibly nothing,
If a man don’t occasionally sit in a senate
how can he pierce the darrk mind of a
senator?
and down there they have been having their Horserace
and I trust they have not destroyed the
old theatre
by restorations, and by late renaissance fancies,
this calvary “we will not descend from,” sd/ the priest
on the damn’d hard bench waiting the horses
and the parade and the float and the flag-play
and the tossing of the flags of the districts
“for another four hours”
“it’s not a district it’s a complex”
explained an expert to an inexpert
re/ the remains of the guilds
where they say: camomile of the field
and the church is broken
and the best de la Robbia busted to flinders
and near what?
It will not take uth twenty yearth
to cwuth Mutholini
and the economic war has begun
(Napoleon etc.) Since Waterloo
nothing etc. Leave the Duke, go for the gold!
action somewhat sporadic
“Will never be used at home
but abroad to increase the
etc. of the lenders,” the eh . . . investors
and is buried in the Red Square in Moscow
along with Andy Jackson, Napoleon and others
there is according to some authors a partial resurrection
of corpses
on all souls day in Cairo
or perhaps all over Egypt
in identity but not atom for atom
Partial resurrection in Cairo.
The bone
I think was his take off
Curious, is it not, that Mr Eliot
has not given more time to
prince of morticians
where none can speak his language
centuries hoarded
to pull up a mass of algae
(and pearls)
or the odour of eucalyptus or sea wrack
How is it far
cat-faced, Maltese cross, sun figure
to each tree its own mouth and savour
“Hot hole hep cat”
or words of similar volume
to be recognized by the god-damned
or man-damned trainee
Prowling night-puss leave my hard squares alone
they are in no case cat food
if you had sense
you wd/ come here at meal time
when meat is superabundant
you can neither eat manuscript nor Confucius
nor even the hebrew scriptures
get out of that bacon box
contract W, 11 oh oh 9 oh
now used as a wardrobe
ex 53 pounds gross weight
the cat-faced eucalyptus nib
is where you cannot get at it
Tune: kitten on the keys
radio steam Calliope
following the Battle Hymn of the Republic
where the honey-wagon cease from stinking
and the nose be at peace
“mi-hine eyes hev”
well yes they have
seen a good deal of it
there is a good deal to be seen
fairly tough and unblastable
and the hymn . . .
well in contrast to the god-damned crooning
put me down for old times
NO MAN
without time
now there are no more days
no man
without time
the water seeps in under the bottle’s seal
Till finally the moon rose like a blue post card
then glaring East Star stared the moon in the face
(Pistol packin’ Jones with an olive branch)
man and dog
on the S. E. horizon
and we note that dog precedes man in the occident
as of course in the orient if the bloke in the dog
is proceeding to rightwards
“Why war?” sd/ the sergeant rum-runner
“too many people! when there git to be too many
you got to kill some of ’em off.”
“But for
sd/ Confucius
“we shd/ still be buttoning our coats tother way on.”
the level of political education in our
eminent armies
is, perhaps, not yet established but
thus I descended through malignant air
one must take the weather as it comes
or to write dialogue because there is
no one to converse with
to take the sheep out to pasture
to bring your gentle reader to the nutriment
gentle reader to the gist of the discourse
to sort out the animals
so that leaving America I brought with me $80
and England a letter of Thomas Hardy’s
and Italy one eucalyptus pip
from the little path that goes up from Rapallo
(if I go)
“I saw me a little boy
nailed to the earth arms outstretched
in the form of a cross.
he groaned: I am the moon.”
His feet on a silver scythe
to me he seemed in a pitiful way
The young Dumas weeps because the young Dumas
has tears
Death’s seeds move in the year
seeds of motion
falling back into the trough of the sea
the moon’s arse’s been chewed off by this time
seeds of motion
“With us there is no deceit”
said the moon nymph immaculate
Give back my cloak,
had I the clouds of heaven
as the sea shells borne ashore
in their holocaust
as wistaria floating shoreward
with the sea gone the colour of copper
and emerald dark in the offing
the young Dumas has tears thus far from the year’s end
she had compassion on silversmiths
revealing the paraclete
standing in the cusp
of the moon
as the larks rise
selfish Aphrodite
of the eternal moods has fallen away
for the long room over the arches
the precise knowledge love the Graces
and when bad government prevailed, like an arrow,
fog rose from the marshland
bringing claustrophobia of the mist
beyond the stockade there is chaos and nothingness
Fare well Piccadilly
Fare well Leicester Square
Their works like cobwebs when the spider is gone
encrust them with sun-shot crystals
and in 40 years no one
“There is no darkness but ignorance”
had read the words on the pedestal
The things I cd/ tell you, he sd/
of how he caught the Caressor’s about to be
Imperial coat tails
and only twice had rec’d 3 penny bits
one from Rothschild
and brought in about 2 ounces of saffron
for a risotto during that first so enormous war
Jah, the Bard’s pedestal is in Leicester Square
in the city of London
but the trope is, as the accurate reader will have observed,
not to be found in Sam Johnson’s edition
The evil that men do lives after them”
well, that is from Julius Caesar
unless memory trick me
who crossed the Rubicon up near Rimini
Where is, or was, an arch
“Wanted to borrow it back”
“I sd/ why? he thought he wd/
make another one like it”
buying someone else’s paintings
whose name
escapes me
But impersonated a sultan
of was it Zanzibar and took up the paving in Bond St.
to compensate for a partial deafness
which, he felt, lost him part of life’s fun
and persuaded an Aussie or Zealander or S. African
to kneel with him in prayer
outside the
tea rooms
and also roused a street demonstration
in Soho for Italy’s entry into combat in
19 or was it 15?
pass Napper, Bottom (correct that to Bottomly)
Gaddy on sick call
will be wanted for gunstocks or need belladonna
and as for sulking
I knew but one Achilles in my time
and he ended up in the Vatican
Hannibals, Hamilcars
in profusion nearly all humble persons
“Jolly woman” said the resplendent head waiter
20 years after i.e. after old Kait’
had puffed in, stewing with rage
concerning the landlady’s doings
with a lodger unnamed
az waz near Gt Tichfield St. next door to the pub
“married wumman, you couldn’t fool her”
Torn from the priest
hurled into unstillness,
front hall full of large photos of Bismark
so that during the Boer war Whistler used to come
and talk strategy
but that he
never cd/ see
the portrait
“like a black fly hanging stuck to that canvas”
till one day after Whistler’s death
I think it was Ysaÿe was with him
who saw the Whistler
for the first time and burst out:
What a fiddle!
It is said that Homer was a medic
who followed the greek armies to Troy
and a navvy rolls up to me in Church St. (Kensington End) with:
Yurra Jurrman!
To which I replied: I am not.
“Well yurr szum kind ov a furriner.”
not being able to uproot
But Spot the great ex-greyhound
used to get wildly excited
at being given large beefsteaks
in Toulouse
and leapt one day finally
right into the centre of the large dining table
and lay there as a centre piece
near the cupboard piled half full
with novels
in the old one franc editions
and you cd’ hear papa
’s voice
clear in the choir that wd/ ring ping on the high altar
in the Bach chorals
true as a pistol shot
and he dumped all his old stock
of calicos plumb bang on the germans
after two or more years of stagnation
old Colonel Jackson
had said to Gaudier:
“my compliments”
when Gaudier had said he wd/ fight for my Country if war came
but that anarchy was the true form of government
(meaning, so far as I cd/ make out, some form of
sindical organization
Jackson at 80 proposed to cook for the armies of Ulster
“the good soup made for the good soldier”)
and he said to Yeats at a vorticist picture show:
“You also of the brotherhood?”
But Dolmetsch died without ever knowing that papa
had broken and mended the support to the lid
of one of his clavichords, Dolmetsch’s own clavichords
painted and toned with that special sacred vermilion,
“It is as good as bread”
and Gluck’s “Iphigénie”
was played in the
garden
Customs change, pain remains.
“In pink crystal helmets the mountebanks”
Mallarmé, Whistler,
Degas
and the bar of the Follies
as Manet saw it, Degas, those two gents crossing ‘La
Place de la Concorde’
one cd/ live in such an apartment
seeing the roofs of Paris
That’s called an attic
The old trees near the Rue Jacob
were propped up to keep them from falling
to Friendship
and M. Jean Cocteau wanted to save that building
what do you call it,
can it have been the old Military School?
“He seems to me,” said his housekeeper
“a priest in disguise”
said to the apache;
you are very badly raised
and his companion said: Wait, she’s telling you . . .
so they left her her hand bag
and the peg-leg stuck it up
at an angle, say about 140 degrees
and pretended it was a fiddle
while the 60 year old bat did a hoolah
to the great applause of that bistro
“Enter then, enter,
it’s everyone’s house”
(This to me
around Christmas)
And three small boys on three bicycles
smacked her young fanny in passing
before she recovered from the surprise of the first swat
these are Parisian customs
where there are also the scant remains of an arena
and The Cluny Museum.
Arena or is it a Roman theatre?
and there was also Uncle William
labouring a sonnet of Ronsard
and the ink’s heir painting high lights
and Monsieur Cocteau who paid, I think, bills
“are you going to shave a canvas?”
(it is sometimes said in the village).
when they elected
before the world was given over to wars
When you are very old
remember that I have remembered,
my little girl,
and pass on the tradition
there can be honesty of mind
without overwhelming talent
I have perhaps seen a waning of that tradition
(young nigger at rest in his wheelbarrow
in the shade back of the jo-house
addresses me: Got it made, kid, you got it made.
White boy says: do you speak Jugoslavian?)
And also near the museum they served it with Cream
in those days (pre 1914)
the loss of that café
meant the end of a B. M. era
(British Museum era)
There were mysterious figures
that emerged from recondite recesses
and ate at the WIENER CAFÉ
which died into banking
“It is the sons pent up within a man”
and now they complain of cummings.
it is my intention, it is my intention
in a tavern, or was, to the Wiener café
you cannot yet buy one dish of Chinese food in all Italy
hence the débacle
“forloyn” said Mr Bridges (Robert)
“we’ll get ’em all back”
meaning archaic words and there had been a fine old fellow
and young fellows go out to the colonies
but go on paying their dues
but old William was right in contending
that the crumbling of a fine house
profits no one
(Celtic or otherwise)
worthy his minstrelsy
a tongue to the sea-cliffs or “Sligo in Heaven”
or his, William’s old “da” at Coney Island perched on an elephant
beaming like the prophet Isaiah
“Liquids and fluids!”
said the palmist. “A painter?
well ain’t that liquids and fluids?” [To the venerable J. B.
bearded Yeats]
“a friend,” sd/ mr cummings, “I knew it ’cause he
never tried to sell me any insurance
Here lives the tradition, as per Whitman in Camden
and an engraving 596 Lexington Ave.,
24 E. 47th,
with Jim at the checquer board by the banana cage
“Funny looking wood, James,” said Aunt F.
“it looks as if it had already been burnt”
[Windsor fire]
“Part o deh roof ma’am.”
does any museum
contain one of the folding beds of that era?
And now, why? Regents Park
(with a fountain)
and the mass of preraphaelite reliques
in a trunk in a walled-up caller in Selsey
“Tyke ’im up ter the bawth” (meaning Swinburne)
“Even Tennyson tried to go out
through the fire-place.”
which is what I suppose he, Fordie, wanted me to be able to picture
But that New York I have found at Périgueux
just as at Arles
in wake of the sarascen
was preceded in fresco at Avignon
and horses armed with the perpendicular lances
and the red-bearded fellow was mending his
young daughter’s shoe
“By Hercules! it is our town”
with such dignity
or where they set tables down by small rivers,
and the stream’s edge is lost in the grass
(Unkle George cd/ not identify the place on that road
because the road had been blown off the side of the mountain
but he climbed about 200 steps of the tower
to see what he had seen thru the roof
of a barn no longer standing
where he had fired that howitzer
and the large eye that found him
at its level was a giraffe’s eye
at dawn, in his nest, hunting leopards.
“The pose” he said “is a taxidermist’s fake
the cobra is not a constrictor
and would not wrap itself round the mongoose”
But on the subject of terrapin
would not believe they cd/ fly
and the bishop brought action for libel
(I think half a million but did not, finally,
take the case into court)
by which time Uncle George was computing
kilowatt energy
from the back of his neck as seen at the Lido
and in that last year
had said: Haile Selassie is not a bad fellow.
In fact the milk-white doe for his cousin
reminding me of the Bank of Egypt
and the gold bars
and the mahogany counters
and desk work in the branch in, was it, Alessandria
and wd/ Whitcomb Riley be still found in a highbrow anthology
Whither go all the fur and the silk gowns
and the wave pattern runs in the stone
on the high parapet
That every month we have a new moon
too quickly taken
from my loneliness let them come
lay there till Rossetti found it remaindered
at about two pence
(Aphrodite, in the moon’s barge whither?
how has thou the crescent for car?
or did they fall because of their loose taste in music
“Here! none of that mathematical music!”
Said the Kommandant when Münch offered Bach to the regiment
or Spewcini the all too human
beloved in the eyetalian peninsula
for quite explicable reasons
so that even I can now tolerate
one looks but with the loss of criteria
and the wandering almost-tenor explained to me:
well, the operas in the usual repertoire
have been sifted out, there’s a reason
Men have I don’t know what strange fear,
said Monsieur Whoosis, of beauty
Beauty, “Beauty is difficult, Yeats” said Aubrey Beardsley
when Yeats asked why he drew horrors
or at least not Burne-Jones
and Beardsley knew he was dying and had to
make his hit quickly
hence no more B-J in his product.
So very difficult, Yeats, beauty so difficult.
“I am the torch”
“she saith”
in the moon barge rosy-fingered dawn
with the veil of faint cloud before her
Aphrodite afraid as a leaf borne in the current
pale eyes as if without fire
all that Botticelli knew,
and that Velásquez never suspected
lost in the brown meat of Rembrandt
and the raw meat of Rubens
“This alone, leather and bones between you and this alone,”
[this alone, the all]
or the bone seed
as the grain seed and the biceps
books, arms, men
and of portraits in our time Cocteau
and Whistler’s
(and the three fat ladies by Sargent, adversely)
and somebody’s portrait
with a background
as it might be the Isle of St Louis for serenity, under Abélard’s bridges
for those trees are Elysium
for serenity
under Abélard’s bridges everything flows
for those trees are serenity
as he had walked under the rain altars
or under the trees of their grove
or would it be under the parapets
in his moving was stillness
as grey stone in the Elysian Fields Cemetery
who first declaimed me the Odyssey
on the docks of what Syracuse?
or what tennis court
near what pine trees?
care and craft in forming leagues and alliances
that avail nothing against the decree
the folly of attacking that island
and of the force beyond destiny
with a mind like that he is one of us
West Wind, kindly
I am at the end of my tether/
That from the gates of death
that from the gates of death: Whitman
found on the jo-house seat at that
in a cheap edition!
hast’ou swum in a sea of air strip
through an aeon of nothingness,
when the raft broke and the waters went over me,
Immaculate Lady, I shall enter
for those who drink of the bitterness
of the ages
give rest to
acts without end Immaculate Queen
The tears that I created swamp me
Late, too late I knew, Sadness,
I have been hard as youth sixty years
if calm be after tempest
that the ants seem to wobble
as the morning sun catches their shadows
(Nadasky, Duett, McAllister,
also Comfort K.P. special mention
on sick call Penrieth, Turner, Toth hieri
(no fortune and with a name to come)
Bankers, Seitz, Hildebrand and Cornelison
Armstrong special mention K.P.
White thanks Bedell thanks
Wiseman (not Williams) African.
with a smoky torch thru the unending
labyrinth of the underground
let him celebrate Christ in the grain
and if the corn cat be beaten
Demeter has lain in my furrow
This wind is lighter than swansdown
the day moves not at all
(Zupp, Bufford, and Bohon)
men of no fortune and with a name to come
his helmet is used for a pisspot
this helmet is used for my footbath
Pepitone was wasting toothwash
as I lay by the drain hole
the guard’s opinion is lower than that of the
prisoners
of the army
Oh to be in England now that Winston’s out
Now that there’s room for doubt
And the bank may be the nation’s
And the long years of patience
And labour’s vacillations
May have let the bacon come home,
To watch how they’ll slip and slide
watch how they’ll try to hide
the real portent
To watch a while from the tower
where dead flies lie thick over the old charter
forgotten, oh quite forgotten
but confirming John’s first one,
and still there if you climb over attic rafters;
to look at the fields; are they tilled?
is the old terrace alive as it might be
with a whole colony
if money be free again?
Chesterton’s England of has-been and why-not,
or is it all rust, ruin, death duties and mortgages
and the great carriage yard empty
and more pictures gone to pay taxes
When a dog is tall but
not so tall as all that
that dog is a Talbot
(a bit long in the pasterns?)
When a butt is 1/2 as tall as a whole butt
That butt is a small butt
Let backe and side go bare
and the old kitchen left as the monks had left it
and the rest as time has cleft it.
[Only shadows enter my tent
as men pass between me and the sunset.]
beyond the eastern barbed wire
a sow with nine boneen
matronly as any duchess at Claridge’s
and for that Christmas
Going out from Southampton
they passed the car by the dozen
who would not have shown weight on a scale
riding, riding
for Noel the green holly
Noel, Noel, the green holly
A dark night for the holly
That would have been Salisbury plain, and I have not thought of
the Lady
for this twelve years
How tiny the panelled room where they stabbed him
In her lap, almost, La Stuart
If all the griefs the plaints the pain
for the leopards and broom plants
Tudor indeed is gone and every rose,
Blood-red, blanch-white that in the sunset glows
Cries: “Blood, Blood, Blood!” against the gothic stone
Of England, as the Howard or Boleyn knows.
Nor seeks the carmine petal to infer;
Nor is the white bud Time’s inquisitor
Proving to know if its new-gnarled root
Twists from York’s head or belly of Lancaster;
Or if a rational soul should stir, perchance,
Within the stem or summer shoot to advance
Contrition’s utmost throw, seeking in thee
But oblivion, not thy forgiveness, FRANCE.
as the young lizard extends his leopard spots
along the grass-blade seeking the green midge half an ant-size
and the Serpentine will look just the same
and the gulls will be as neat on the pond
and the sunken garden unchanged
and God knows what else is left of our London
my London, your London
and if her green elegance
remains on this side of my rain ditch
puss lizard will lunch on some other T-bone
sunset grand couturier.
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