The Sardonic Arm. Maxwell Bodenheim

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СКАЧАТЬ and gold.

       With a spiritual savageness

       Colors bring their lucid treason

       To ancient, shrouded tyrannies.

       The knitted green of this girl’s sweater

       Is a badge releasing

       A cool republic of desire

       Unrelated to earth.

       Her famished opaque face

       Feeds on sleek anticipations—

       Unconscious incongruity.

      Color alone is real,

       Waving perpetually

       Over the graves of thought and emotion.

       From the vaster shapes of color

       Small and involved broods of thought and emotion

       Are born to scorn their distant mothers.

       The ruffian dream recedes

       Over a span of twenty thousand years,

       And color, awake and supreme,

       Waits to be once more divided

       By another nightmare dream.

       If men could see this they might kneel

       Upon this sidewalk and observe

       The importance of apple-peelings

       Testing their spirals of red

       Against the thick, brown stream.

THE INCURABLE MYSTIC ANSWERS WESTERN AMBITIONS

       Table of Contents

      Western men,

       Your life is a minor rhapsody

       For flute and violin.

       With sounds, now shrill, now suave,

       You steal your hymns and frolics

       From the surface dirt of realism

       And the curves of sensuality.

       Your feeble mysticism

       Strains at the task of lifting tables

       And placing naïve retorts

       Into the mouths of spirits.

       Your erudition is the vain

       Gesture of your repentance

       Grown over-thin and complex.

       Western men, you are beggars

       Devouring bits of guile

       Tossed from a violent mirage.

       The contours of a rose

       Bribing the quiet madness of evening

       With cunning promises of red,

       Are more important than your sweating love

       And the rushing dreads of your market-places.

       The contours of a rose

       Will still arrange their subtle dream

       When your clever schemes of mud

       Win the drifting pension of dust.

       Your charts and diagrams

       Are merely a ragamuffin’s initials

       Cut into an ancient gateway

       That guards the invisible meaning of life.

PLATONIC NARRATIVE

       Table of Contents

      Tomato soup at four A. M.

       We seemed to sit upon the floor

       But, with a feathery discretion,

       We advised our bodies

       To make the floor a glistening fundamental

       Flattened by the walk of centuries.

       Continuing the advice,

       We told our bodies to arrange

       A variation on the floor

       And give the floor a living

       Reason for existence.

       Our bodies, with clandestine movements,

       Accepted the advice

       And became the essences of Plato,

       Almost tempting our flesh

       To renounce its weight.

       Our lifted knees were actors

       Simulating treason to our souls,

       With their prominence of bone.

       They were interviewed

       By elbows that held a light disbelief.

       Our backs against the cushions

       Had disappeared, and we did not move

       For fear that all of us

       Might rush away through the openings.

       Our heads were fiercely bent down,

       As though they felt an ecstasy

       Of shame at their crudity …

       When we returned to the tomato soup

       It was an insipid fluid,

       But we drank it indifferently,

       And it is also possible

       That an unearthly laugh

       Peered through the crevices of our eyes,

       Finding no need for sound.

PORTRAITS

       Table of Contents

I.

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