The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read online

  But for the abominable shadows

  I would have lived

  Among their fearful furniture

  To teach them to tell me their secrets

  Before I guessed

  —Sweeping the brood clean out

  V

  Midnight empties the street

  Of all but us

  Three

  I am undecided which way back

  To the left a boy

  —One wing has been washed in the rain

  The other will never be clean any more—

  Pulling door-bells to remind

  Those that are snug

  To the right a haloed ascetic

  Threading houses

  Probes wounds for souls

  —The poor can’t wash in hot water—

  And I don’t know which turning to take

  Since you got home to yourself—first

  VI

  I know the Wire-Puller intimately

  And if it were not for the people

  On whom you keep one eye

  You could look straight at me

  And Time would be set back

  VII

  My pair of feet

  Smack the flag-stones

  That are something left over from your walking

  The wind stuffs the scum of the white street

  Into my lungs and my nostrils

  Exhilarated birds

  Prolonging flight into the night

  Never reaching— — — — — — —

  VIII

  I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends

  That lit your adolescent learning

  — — — — — — — — — —

  Behind God’s eyes

  There might

  Be other lights

  IX

  When we lifted

  Our eye-lids on Love

  A cosmos

  Of coloured voices

  And laughing honey

  And spermatozoa

  At the core of Nothing

  In the milk of the Moon

  X

  Shuttle-cock and battle-door

  A little pink-love

  And feathers are strewn

  XI

  Dear one at your mercy

  Our Universe

  Is only

  A colorless onion

  You derobe

  Sheath by sheath

  Remaining

  A disheartening odour

  About your nervy hands

  XII

  Voices break on the confines of passion

  Desire Suspicion Man Woman

  Solve in the humid carnage

  Flesh from flesh

  Draws the inseparable delight

  Kissing at gasps to catch it

  Is it true

  That I have set you apart

  Inviolate in an utter crystallization

  Of all the jolting of the crowd

  Taught me willingly to live to share

  Or are you

  Only the other half

  Of an ego’s necessity

  Scourging pride with compassion

  To the shallow sound of dissonance

  And boom of escaping breath

  XIII

  Come to me There is something

  I have got to tell you and I can’t tell

  Something taking shape

  Something that has a new name

  A new dimension

  A new use

  A new illusion

  It is ambient And it is in your eyes

  Something shiny Something only for you

  Something that I must not see

  It is in my ears Something very resonant

  Something that you must not hear

  Something only for me

  Let us be very jealous

  Very suspicious

  Very conservative

  Very cruel

  Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations

  Disorb inviolate egos

  Where two or three are welded together

  They shall become god

  — — — — — — —

  Oh that’s right

  Keep away from me Please give me a push

  Don’t let me understand you Don’t realise me

  Or we might tumble together

  Depersonalized

  Identical

  Into the terrific Nirvana

  Me you — you — me

  XIV

  Today

  Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible

  To you

  I bring the nascent virginity of

  —Myself for the moment

  No love or the other thing

  Only the impact of lighted bodies

  Knocking sparks off each other

  In chaos

  XV

  Seldom Trying for Love

  Fantasy dealt them out as gods

  Two or three men looked only human

  But you alone

  Superhuman apparently

  I had to be caught in the weak eddy

  Of your drivelling humanity

  To love you most

  XVI

  We might have lived together

  In the lights of the Arno

  Or gone apple stealing under the sea

  Or played

  Hide and seek in love and cob-webs

  And a lullaby on a tin-pan

  And talked till there were no more tongues

  To talk with

  And never have known any better

  XVII

  I don’t care

  Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to

  Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride

  Or what would look at me

  If the shutters were not shut

  Red a warm colour on the battle-field

  Heavy on my knees as a counterpane

  Count counter

  I counted the fringe of the towel

  Till two tassels clinging together

  Let the square room fall away

  From a round vacuum

  Dilating with my breath

  XVIII

  Out of the severing

  Of hill from hill

  The interim

  Of star from star

  The nascent

  Static

  Of night

  XIX

  Nothing so conserving

  As cool cleaving

  Note of the Q H U

  Clear carving

  Breath-giving

  Pollen smelling

  Space

  White telling

  Of slaking

  Drinkable

  Through fingers

  Running water

  Grass haulms

  Grow to

  Leading astray

  Of fireflies

  Aerial quadrille

  Bouncing

  Off one another

  Again conjoining

  In recaptured pulses

  Of light

  You too

  Had something

  At that time

  Of a green-lit glow-worm

  — — — — — — —

  Yet slowly drenched

  To raylessness

  In rain

  XX

  Let Joy go solace-winged

  To flutter whom she may concern

  XXI

  I store up nights against you

  Heavy with shut-flower’s nightmares

  — — — — — — — — — —

  Stack noons

  Curled to the solitaire

  Core of the

  Sun

  XXII

  Green things grow

  Salads

  For the cerebral

  Forager’s revival

  Upon bossed bellies

  Of mountains

  Rolling in the sun

  And flowered flummery

  Break
s

  To my silly shoes

  In ways without you

  I go

  Gracelessly

  As things go

  XXIII

  Laughter in solution

  Stars in a stare

  Irredeemable pledges

  Of pubescent consummations

  Rot

  To the recurrent moon

  Bleach

  To the pure white

  Wickedness of pain

  XXIV

  The procreative truth of Me

  Petered out

  In pestilent

  Tear drops

  Little lusts and lucidities

  And prayerful lies

  Muddled with the heinous acerbity

  Of your street-corner smile

  XXV

  Licking the Arno

  The little rosy

  Tongue of Dawn

  Interferes with our eyelashes

  — — — — — — — —

  We twiddle to it

  Round and round

  Faster

  And turn into machines

  Till the sun

  Subsides in shining

  Melts some of us

  Into abysmal pigeon-holes

  Passion has bored

  In warmth

  Some few of us

  Grow to the level of cool plains

  Cutting our foot-hold

  With steel eyes

  XXVI

  Shedding our petty pruderies

  From slit eyes

  We sidle up

  To Nature

  — — — that irate pornographist

  XXVII

  Nucleus Nothing

  Inconceivable concept

  Insentient repose

  The hands of races

  Drop off from

  Immodifiable plastic

  The contents

  Of our ephemeral conjunction

  In aloofness from Much

  Flowed to approachment of — — — —

  NOTHING

  There was a man and a woman

  In the way

  While the Irresolvable

  Rubbed with our daily deaths

  Impossible eyes

  XXVIII

  The steps go up for ever

  And they are white

  And the first step is the last white

  Forever

  Coloured conclusions

  Smelt to synthetic

  Whiteness

  Of my

  Emergence

  And I am burnt quite white

  In the climacteric

  Withdrawal of your sun

  And wills and words all white

  Suffuse

  Illimitable monotone

  White where there is nothing to see

  But a white towel

  Wipes the cymophanous sweat

  —Mist rise of living—

  From your

  Etiolate body

  And the white dawn

  Of your New Day

  Shuts down on me

  Unthinkable that white over there

  — — — Is smoke from your house

  XXIX

  Evolution fall foul of

  Sexual equality

  Prettily miscalculate

  Similitude

  Unnatural selection

  Breed such sons and daughters

  As shall jibber at each other

  Uninterpretable cryptonyms

  Under the moon

  Give them some way of braying brassily

  For caressive calling

  Or to homophonous hiccoughs

  Transpose the laugh

  Let them suppose that tears

  Are snowdrops or molasses

  Or anything

  Than human insufficiencies

  Begging dorsal vertebrae

  Let meeting be the turning

  To the antipodean

  And Form a blurr

  Anything

  Than seduce them

  To the one

  As simple satisfaction

  For the other

  Let them clash together

  From their incognitoes

  In seismic orgasm

  For far further

  Differentiation

  Rather than watch

  Own-self distortion

  Wince in the alien ego

  XXX

  In some

  Prenatal plagiarism

  Fœtal buffoons

  Caught tricks

  — — — — —

  From archetypal pantomime

  Stringing emotions

  Looped aloft

  — — — —

  For the blind eyes

  That Nature knows us with

  And the most of Nature is green

  — — — — — — — — — —

  What guaranty

  For the proto-form

  We fumble

  Our souvenir ethics to

  — — — — — — —

  XXXI

  Crucifixion

  Of a busy-body

  Longing to interfere so

  With the intimacies

  Of your insolent isolation

  Crucifixion

  Of an illegal ego’s

  Eclosion

  On your equilibrium

  Caryatid of an idea

  Crucifixion

  Wracked arms

  Index extremities

  In vacuum

  To the unbroken fall

  XXXII

  The moon is cold

  Joannes

  Where the Mediterranean — — — — —

  XXXIII

  The prig of passion — — — —

  To your professorial paucity

  Proto-plasm was raving mad

  Evolving us — — —

  XXXIV

  Love — — — the preeminent litterateur

  III

  CORPSES AND GENIUSES

  (POEMS 1919–1930)

  Passport photo of Loy, 1920s

  O Hell

  To clear the drifts of spring

  Of our forebear’s excrements

  And bury the subconscious archives

  Under unaffected flowers

  Indeed—

  Our person is a covered entrance to infinity

  Choked with the tatters of tradition

  Goddesses and Young Gods

  Caress the sanctity of Adolescence

  In the shaft of the sun.

  The Dead

  We have flowed out of ourselves

  Beginning on the outside

  That shrivable skin

  Where you leave off

  Of infinite elastic

  Walking the ceiling

  Our eyelashes polish stars

  Curled close in the youngest corpuscle

  Of a descendant

  We spit up our passions in our grand-dams

  Fixing the extension of your reactions

  Our shadow lengthens

  In your fear

  You are so old

  Born in our immortality

  Stuck fast as Life

  In one impalpable

  Omniprevalent Dimension

  We are turned inside out

  Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs

  Street lights footle in our ocular darkness

  Having swallowed your irate hungers

  Satisfied before bread-breaking

  To your dissolution

  We splinter into Wholes

  Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow

  Among the refuse of your unborn centuries

  In our busy ashbins

  Stink the melodies

  Of your

  So easily reducible

  Adolescences

  Our tissue is of that which escapes you

  Birth-Breaths and orgasms

  The shattering tremor of the static

  The far-shore of
an instant

  The unsurpassable openness of the circle

  Legerdemain of God

  Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums

  Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves

  Break on our edgeless contours

  The mouthed echoes of what

  Has exuded to our companionship

  Is horrible to the ear

  Of the half that is left inside them.

  Mexican Desert

  The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive

  trailing her rattling wooden tail

  into the jazz-band sunset. . . .

  The mountains in a row

  set pinnacles of ferocious isolation

  under the alien hot heaven

  Vegetable cripples of drought

  thrust up the parching appeal

  cracking open the earth

  stump-fingered cacti

  and hunch-back palm trees

  belabour the cinders of twilight. . . .

  Perlun

  the whipper snapper child of the sun

  His pert blonde spirit

  scoured by the Scandinavian Boreas

  His head

  an adolescent oval

  ostrich egg

  The victorious silly beauty of his face

  awakens to his instincts

  A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold

  he puts the world

  to the test of intuition

  Smiling from ear to ear

  Living from other hands to mouth

  Holding in immaculate arms

  the syphilitic sailor

  on his avoided death bunk

  or the movie vamp

  among the muffled shadows of the shrubberies——

  Picking lemons in Los Angeles broke

  The education of “Prince Fils à Papa”

  How low men die

  How women love—

  The rituals of Dempsey and Carpentier

  PERLUN

  asks “Do these flappers of the millionaires

  think I’m a doll for anyone to pat?”

  Poe

  a lyric elixir of death

  embalms

  the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves

  on moon spun nights

  sets

  icicled canopy

  for corpses of poesy

  with roses and northern lights

  Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles

  sing burial rites

  Apology of Genius

  Ostracized as we are with God—

  The watchers of the civilized wastes

  reverse their signals on our track

  Lepers of the moon

  all magically diseased

  we come among you

  innocent

  of our luminous sores

  unknowing

  how perturbing lights

  our spirit

  on the passion of Man

  until you turn on us your smooth fools’ faces

  like buttocks bared in aboriginal mockeries

  We are the sacerdotal clowns

  who feed upon the wind and stars

  and pulverous pastures of poverty

  Our wills are formed

  by curious disciplines

  beyond your laws

  You may give birth to us