Collected Poems 1931-74 Read Free Page B

warm male sperm in me,
    Hideously wary of death.
    Â Â  I have been rooted wheat—
    A legless stalk hanging on the ground
    While a destroyer roves
    Nearer and always nearer: oblivious:
    Twisting the wicked sickle in my roots—
    An old man
    Who destroys
    Under a dancing sun.
    1980/ 1934

FACES
    For F. A.
    I
    So many masks, the people that I meet,
    So many coloured faces—
    Carnival idols wagging in a lanterned street,
    Plaster and pigment grimaces.
    Not one but wears smooth porcelain for a frown,
    Not one the livelong daytime,
    Can I say: ‘Here loveliness’? or ‘Here walks guile’?
    Always beneath the smile
    I know the apparatus of the bone,
    The structure pinned with ligament,
    The sliding gristle, coil of artery:
    All, all, delicate, nimble, wired, machinery,
    Snugly buttoned in
    A supple glove of flesh,
    A snake-smooth film of skin,
    Smooth, smooth, flawless and bland as rubber….
II
    And, if I smile
    What can you see, what guess?
    Your own, your little idiot uniformity
    Reciprocates a perfect puppet nothingness;
    A null collision of minute desires
    Transliterated thus by muscle-play….
    Behold,
    Behold your mincing jowls a-swing on wires!
    No, no. My friend
    We are void idols still,
    Ridiculous clicking dolls,
    Mumming the silly ciphers of pretence:
    Always intent to end
    Our awful emptiness by alphabets.
    Our speech, our hapless intercourse
    Seems always just removed from actual sense.
    Can you deny me that the laughter-mask
    Clamps back upon itself to trace
    Only the raving jaw-line of the skeleton?
    That in your hanging face
    A smile is an expression of despairs,
    With mouth a hanging flap,
    A slip of skin twiddled by subcutaneous hairs,
    A juggling parody of what you say?
    In fine,
    Your mouth’s a letter-box,
    A hippo’s bun-trap …
    Your mouth, my friend … and mine!
III
    So many masks …
    So very many faces….
    Will you remember, then, when next we walk
    Among the lanterns and the lights,
    Among the half-light of your chance desires
    We are but carnival idols still—
    Poor rag-dolls twitched on wincing wires
    Fingered by impulse?
    A couple of barking cattle
    With a fool rictus gouged upon our faces!
    Will you remember as we yapp and boom
    How poor a condolence
    The formal utterance is
    For being two bloody zeros,
    Mnemotechnic heroes:
    Sick hack-satires on meaning by Infinity,
    With not one working sense
    That does not illustrate our own
    And all humanity’s impertinence?
    1980/ 1934

LOVE POEMS
    I
    Lost, you may not smile upon me now:
    You, nor that grey-eyed counterpart of you
    Inhabiting the sunlight in still places:
    Substant always in the netted moonshine.
    â€˜Remember’ is a lost cry on a wind:
    A hollow nothing-heard,
    Most memorable, in a deaf night
    That does not heed.
    I have forgot even, dear pagan,
    The holding of hands, the beseeching,
    Intolerable darling!
    No more do the loose hands of devilry
    Tangle your fingers like nets in my soul.
    You … I …
    They are such very little faces—
    Flowers in a stippled moonshine
    Only recalled when the moon’s a mad farthing,
    The sky a december of steel.
II
    I cannot fix the very moment or the hour,
    But an inevitable sometime I shall meet
    One face, your face among the faces,
    Notice one step
    Among the winding footfalls of a hollow street.
    Perhaps at evening in smooth rain
    That runs all silver-shod among the houses,
    In a void gathering of men and women
    Who tread their lives out on the jointed stones,
    I shall be challenged by your smile again:
    Your voice above the loaded gutter’s monotones.
    Voice among voices …
    Face among faces….
    I cannot fix the moment, and my present clock,
    The dandelion-puff, lies cruelly;
    Yet, in the action of that hour’s surprise
    What will you do, or I?
    Catch hands and laugh upon each other’s eyes?
    Or will some imp of the spontaneous moment
    Devise some other signal than this?
    Shall I, perhaps, put hands upon