The Lost Lunar Baedeker Page 6
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