The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read online

  or marry us

  the chances of your flesh

  are not our destiny—

  The cuirass of the soul

  still shines—

  And we are unaware

  if you confuse

  such brief

  corrosion with possession

  In the raw caverns of the Increate

  we forge the dusk of Chaos

  to that imperious jewellery of the Universe

  —the Beautiful—

  While to your eyes

  A delicate crop

  of criminal mystic immortelles

  stands to the censor’s scythe.

  Brancusi’s Golden Bird

  The toy

  become the aesthetic archetype

  As if

  some patient peasant God

  had rubbed and rubbed

  the Alpha and Omega

  of Form

  into a lump of metal

  A naked orientation

  unwinged unplumed

  —the ultimate rhythm

  has lopped the extremities

  of crest and claw

  from

  the nucleus of flight

  The absolute act

  of art

  conformed

  to continent sculpture

  —bare as the brow of Osiris—

  this breast of revelation

  an incandescent curve

  licked by chromatic flames

  in labyrinths of reflections

  This gong

  of polished hyperaesthesia

  shrills with brass

  as the aggressive light

  strikes

  its significance

  The immaculate

  conception

  of the inaudible bird

  occurs

  in gorgeous reticence . . .

  Lunar Baedeker

  A silver Lucifer

  serves

  cocaine in cornucopia

  To some somnambulists

  of adolescent thighs

  draped

  in satirical draperies

  Peris in livery

  prepare

  Lethe

  for posthumous parvenues

  Delirious Avenues

  lit

  with the chandelier souls

  of infusoria

  from Pharoah’s tombstones

  lead

  to mercurial doomsdays

  Odious oasis

  in furrowed phosphorous— — —

  the eye-white sky-light

  white-light district

  of lunar lusts

  — — — Stellectric signs

  “Wing shows on Starway”

  “Zodiac carrousel”

  Cyclones

  of ecstatic dust

  and ashes whirl

  crusaders

  from hallucinatory citadels

  of shattered glass

  into evacuate craters

  A flock of dreams

  browse on Necropolis

  From the shores

  of oval oceans

  in the oxidized Orient

  Onyx-eyed Odalisques

  and ornithologists

  observe

  the flight

  of Eros obsolete

  And “Immortality”

  mildews…

  in the museums of the moon

  “Nocturnal cyclops”

  “Crystal concubine”

  — — — — — — —

  Pocked with personification

  the fossil virgin of the skies

  waxes and wanes— — — —

  Der Blinde Junge

  The dam Bellona

  littered

  her eyeless offspring

  Kreigsopfer

  upon the pavements of Vienna

  Sparkling precipitate

  the spectral day

  involves

  the visionless obstacle

  this slow blind face

  pushing

  its virginal nonentity

  against the light

  Pure purposeless eremite

  of centripetal sentience

  Upon the carnose horologe of the ego

  the vibrant tendon index moves not

  since the black lightning desecrated

  the retinal altar

  Void and extinct

  this planet of the soul

  strains from the craving throat

  in static flight upslanting

  A downy youth’s snout

  nozzling the sun

  drowned in dumbfounded instinct

  Listen!

  illuminati of the coloured earth

  How this expressionless “thing”

  blows out damnation and concussive dark

  Upon a mouth-organ

  Crab-Angel

  An atomic sprite

  perched on a polished

  monster-stallion

  reigns over Ringling’s revolving

  trinity of circus attractions

  Something the contour

  of a captured crab

  waving its useless pearly claws

  From a squat body

  pigmy arms

  and bow legs

  with their baroque calves

  curve in a bi-circular attitude

  to a ballerina’s exstacy

  An effigy of Christmas Eves

  smile-cast among chrysanthemum curls

  it seems a sugar angel

  while from a rose flecked ruff of gauze

  its manly legs

  stamp on the vast rump of the horse

  An iridescent speck

  dripped from a rainbow

  onto an ebony cloud

  Crab-Angel I christen you

  minnikin of masquerade sex

  Helen of Lilliput?

  Hercules in a powder puff?

  SONG

  “Had you been born

  in regions of the Unicorn

  To balance on his ivory horn

  perhaps — — —”

  “Per Bacco! ’Tis an idiot dwarf

  hooked to a wire to make him jump”

  Automaton bare-back rider

  the circus-master

  jerks

  your invisible pendulence

  from an over-head pulley

  to your illusory

  leaps in up-a-loft

  signs

  the horse

  racing the orchestra

  in rushing show

  throw

  his whimsy wire-hung dominator

  to dart

  through circus skies of arc-lit dust

  Crab-Angel like a swimming star

  clutching the tail-end of the Chimera

  An aerial acrobat

  floats on the coiling lightning

  of the whirligig

  lifts

  to the elated symmetry of Flight — — —

  A startled rose

  whirls in the chaos of the hoofs

  The jeering jangling

  jazz

  crashes to silence

  The dwarf—

  subsides like an ironic sigh

  to the soft earth

  and ploughs

  his bow-legged way

  laboriously towards the exit

  waving a yellow farewell with his perruque

  Joyce’s Ulysses

  The Normal Monster

  sings in the Green Sahara

  The voice and offal

  of the image of God

  make Celtic noises

  in these lyrical hells

  Hurricanes

  of reasoned musics

  reap the uncensored earth

  The loquent consciousness

  of living things

  pours in torrential languages

  The elderly colloquists

  the Spirit and the Flesh

  are out of tongue — — —

 
The Spirit

  is impaled upon the phallus

  Phœnix

  of Irish fires

  lighten the Occident

  with Ireland’s wings

  flap pandemoniums

  of Olympian prose

  and satirize

  the imperial Rose

  of Gaelic perfumes

  —England

  the sadistic mother

  embraces Erin—

  Master

  of meteoric idiom

  present

  The word made flesh

  and feeding upon itself

  with erudite fangs

  The sanguine

  introspection of the womb

  Don Juan

  of Judea

  upon a pilgrimage

  to the Libido

  The Press — — —

  purring

  its lullabyes to sanity

  Christ capitalised

  scourging

  incontrite usurers of destiny

  —in hole and corner temples

  And hang

  the soul’s advertisements

  outside the ecclesiast’s Zoo

  A gravid day

  spawns

  guttural gargoyles

  upon the Tower of Babel

  Empyrean emporium

  where the

  rejector—recreator

  Joyce

  flashes the giant reflector

  on the sub rosa — — —

  “The Starry Sky” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS

  who raised

  these rocks of human mist

  pyramidical survivors

  in the cyclorama of space

  In the

  austere theatre of the Infinite

  the ghosts of the stars

  perform the “Presence”

  Their celibate shadows

  fall

  upon the aged radiance

  of suns and moons

  — The nerves of Heaven

  flinching

  from the antennæ

  of the intellect

  — the rays

  that pierce

  the nocturnal heart

  The airy eyes of angels

  the sublime

  experiment in pointillism

  faded away

  The celestial conservatories

  blooming with light

  are all blown out

  Enviable immigrants

  into the pure dimension

  immune serene

  devourers of the morning stars of Job

  Jehovah’s seven days

  err in your silent entrails

  of geometric Chimeras

  The Nirvanic snows

  drift— — —

  to sky worn images

  Marble

  Greece has thrown white shadows

  sown

  their eyeballs with oblivion

  A flock of stone

  Gods

  perched upon pedestals

  A populace

  of athlete lilies

  of the galleries

  scoop the facades of space

  with spiral curves

  of idol substance

  in the silence

  A colonnade

  Apollo haunts Apollo

  with the shade

  of a lost hand

  Gertrude Stein

  Curie

  of the laboratory

  of vocabulary

  she crushed

  the tonnage

  of consciousness

  congealed to phrases

  to extract

  a radium of the word

  The Widow’s Jazz

  The white flesh quakes to the negro soul

  Chicago! Chicago!

  An uninterpretable wail

  stirs in a tangle of pale snakes

  to the lethargic ecstasy of steps

  backing into primeval goal

  White man quit his actin’ wise

  colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes

  Haunted by wind instruments

  in groves of grace

  the maiden saplings

  slant to the oboes

  and shampooed gigolos

  prowl to the sobbing taboos.

  An electric crown

  crashes the furtive cargoes of the floor.

  the pruned contours

  dissolve

  in the brazen shallows of dissonance

  revolving mimes

  of the encroaching Eros

  in adolescence

  The black brute-angels

  in their human gloves

  bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks

  and impish musics

  crumble the ecstatic loaf

  before a swooning flock of doves.

  Cravan

  colossal absentee

  the substitute dark

  rolls to the incandescent memory

  of love’s survivor

  on this rich suttee

  seared by the flames of sound

  the widowed urn

  holds impotently

  your murdered laughter

  Husband

  how secretly you cuckold me with death

  while this cajoling jazz

  blows with its tropic breath

  among the echoes of the flesh

  a synthesis

  of racial caress

  The seraph and the ass

  in this unerring esperanto

  of the earth

  converse

  of everlit delight

  as my desire

  receded

  to the distance of the dead

  searches

  the opaque silence

  of unpeopled space.

  Lady Laura in Bohemia

  Trained in a circus of swans

  she

  proceeds recedingly

  Her eliminate flesh of fashion

  inseparable from the genealogical tree

  columns such towering reticence

  of lifted chin

  her hiccoughs seem

  preparatory to bowing to the Queen

  Her somersault descent

  into the half-baked underworld

  nor the inebriate regret

  disturb

  her vertical caste

  “They drove ’em from the cradle on the curb”

  This abbess-prostitute

  presides

  Jazz-Mass

  the gin-fizz eucharist dispenses

  —she kisses and curses

  in the inconsummate embraces

  of a one armed Pittsburger

  “Here zip along out of that, Laura!”

  “I can’t come to Armenonville with you-u

  I want to stay here and behave like a grue-u”

  Her hell is

  Zelli’s

  Where she floods the bar

  with all her curls

  in the delirious tears from those bill-poster eyes

  plastering ‘court proceedings’ on the wall

  of her inconsiderable soul

  A tempered tool

  of an exclusive finishing-school

  her velvet larynx

  slushes

  “Glup—you mustn’t speak to me

  I’m bad—haven’t you heard?

  I’m Orful—o—g’lup I’m Horrid”

  She gushes

  “——know young Detruille?

  Isn’t he di-vi-ne

  Such a sweet nature

  that boy has

  The other night when he tucked in with me

  we talked most seriously

  we have the same ideals

  My dear he has

  the eyes of Buddha

  O I think he’s simply di-vi-ne

  The only man who ever understood

  everything— If I’d liked

  he would’a’

  married me

  O I think he’s
simply di-vi-ne”

  Out of the sentimental slobber

  Lady Laura—momentarily sober

  “How queer—that Detruille

  said that he

  once was introduced—

  Well, I do wonder

  how on earth ever such a bounder

  happened to meet my people”

  Sobs on my shoulder—

  the memorable divorcée

  and christened by the archbishop of Canterbury

  Sixteen co-re—

  Well let that pass!

  She is yet like a diamond on a heap of broken glass.

  The Mediterranean Sea

  The monstrous sapphire

  lies in her lavish dowry

  Crowned by Casinos

  set with Provençal

  olives

  and spears to the mistral

  The prevalent Fair

  draws idle tides

  over volcanic privacies

  frilled with the rouse and hush of drowsing foam

  Jewelled on her Adriatic arm

  Venice, sarcophagus of sighs

  and ghostly merchandise,

  Splinters on the opal angle of the sun

  and dies to the Angelus

  an over purpled peach

  swarmed by the flies of dusk

  From the green incline

  of vengence

  the Vesuvian vine

  drips lucently

  Lacrimae Christi

  to drift imperceptibly

  with the lost sob of Shelley

  Hewn in the Apuane

  Carrara stands

  as marble sentinel

  beyond the blazing rust

  of branches

  roofing amphibian babies

  as they rise

  from the Ligurian gullies

  Their polished thighs

  armoured with aqueous ashes

  of the tinselled sands.

  Nancy Cunard

  Your eyes diffused with holly lights

  of ancient Christmas

  helmeted with masks

  whose silken nostrils

  point the cardinal airs,

  The vermilion wall

  receding as a sin

  beyond your moonstone whiteness,

  Your chiffon voice

  tears with soft mystery

  a lily loaded with a sucrose dew

  of vigil carnival,

  Your lone fragility

  of mythological queens

  conjures long-vanished dragons —

  — their vast jaws

  yawning in disillusion,

  Your drifting hands

  faint as exotic snow

  spread silver silence

  as a fondant nun

  framed in the facing profiles

  of Princess Murat

  and George Moore

  Jules Pascin

  So this is death

  to rise to the occasion

  a shadow

  to a shadowy persuasion

  Pascin has passed

  with his affectionate swagger

  his air

  of the Crown in the role of jester.

  The side-long derby-slanted Bulgar