one afternoon four years ago
and slept with me every night since.
How do you find my sailor eyes after all this time?
Am I what you expected?
Are we together too much?
Did Destiny shy at the double Turkish towel,
our knowledge of each other’s skin,
our love which is a proverb on the block,
our agreement that in matters spiritual
I should be the Man of Destiny
and you should be the Woman of the House?
QUEEN VICTORIA AND ME
Queen Victoria
my father and all his tobacco loved you
I love you too in all your forms
the slim unlovely virgin anyone would lay
the white figure floating among German beards
the mean governess of the huge pink maps
the solitary mourner of a prince
Queen Victoria
I am cold and rainy
I am dirty as a glass roof in a train station
I feel like an empty cast-iron exhibition
I want ornaments on everything
because my love she gone with other boys
Queen Victoria
do you have a punishment under the white lace
will you be short with her
and make her read little Bibles
will you spank her with a mechanical corset
I want her pure as power
I want her skin slightly musty with petticoats
will you wash the easy bidets out of her head
Queen Victoria
I’m not much nourished by modern love
Will you come into my life
with your sorrow and your black carriages
and your perfect memory
Queen Victoria
The 20th century belongs to you and me
Let us be two severe giants
(not less lonely for our partnership)
who discolour test tubes in the halls of science
who turn up unwelcome at every World’s Fair
heavy with proverb and correction
confusing the star-dazed tourists
with our incomparable sense of loss
THE PURE LIST AND
THE COMMENTARY
The Pure List
The alarm clock invented the day
Savana the evil scientist
I loved you in blouses
It’s the laundry ringing
Your bra was so flimsy
Albert Hotel sixth floor
A shoe box of drugs
I looked for you in the audience
Lie down forever in the Photomat
Your sister has blond hair
Does Perception work
Do you say zero or oh
Very few people have thighs
Etc.
The Commentary
1. The alarm clock invented the day. Luckily the glass was broken and I could twist the black moustaches. They turned into angry black whips tethered to a screw in the middle of a sundial, writhing to get free.
2. Savana the evil scientist, foe of Captain Marvel and the entire Marvel family, I summon you from your migrating Mosaic grave. Tireless worker! If I must lose, let me lose like thee!
3. I loved you in blouses. I rubbed sun-tan lotion on your back and other parts. I did this in all seasons. I loved you in old-fashioned garters. I wanted to make a brown photograph about you and pass it around cloakrooms. I would have snatched it away from someone and beat up his face.
4. It’s the laundry ringing, ringing, ringing. It’s a lovely sound for a Saturday morning, n’est-ce pas? The delivery boy has no place else to go. He is of a different race. Perhaps he’s looked through my shirts. I think these people know too much about us.
5. Your bra was so flimsy and light, just a tantalizing formality. I thought it would die in my pocket like a corsage.
6. Albert Hotel sixth floor seven thirty p.m. On the scratched table I set out in a row a copper bust of Stalin, a plaster of paris bust of Beethoven, a china jug shaped like Winston Churchill’s head, a reproduction of a fragment of the True Cross, a small idol, a photograph of a drawing of the Indian Chief Pontiac, hair, an applicator used for artificial insemination. I undressed and waited for power.
7. A shoe box of drugs. Isn’t this carrying deception too far? Where will you keep your shoes?
8. I looked for you in the audience when I delivered the Memorial Lecture. Ladies and Gents, the honour is the same but the pleasure is somewhat diminished. I had expected, I had hoped to find among your faces a face which once – No, I have said too much. Let me continue. The pith of plant stems, the marrow of bones, the cellular, central, inner part of animal hair, the medulla oblongata … I exposed these fine minds to bravery, Etc.
THE NEW STEP
A Ballet-Drama in One Act
CHARACTERS:
MARY and DIANE, two working girls who room together. MARY is very plain, plump, clumsy: ugly, if one is inclined to the word. She is the typical victim of beauty courses and glamour magazines. Her life is a search for, a belief in the technique, the elixir, the method, the secret, the hint that will transform and render her forever lovely. DIANE is a natural beauty, tall, fresh and graceful, one of the blessed. She moves to a kind of innocent sexual music, incapable of any gesture which could intrude on this high animal grace. To watch her pull on her nylons is all one needs of ballet or art.
HARRY is the man Diane loves. He has the proportions we associate with Greek statuary. Clean, tall, openly handsome, athletic. He glitters with health, decency, and mindlessness.
THE COLLECTOR is a woman over thirty, grotesquely obese, a great heap, deformed, barely mobile. She possesses a commanding will and combines the fascination of the tyrant and the freak. Her jolliness asks for no charity. All her movements represent the triumph of a rather sinister spiritual energy over an intolerable mass of flesh.
SCENE:
It is eight o’clock of a Saturday night. All the action takes place in the girls’ small apartment which need be furnished with no more than a dressing-mirror, wardrobe, record-player, easy chair, and a front door. We have the impression, as we do from the dwelling places of most bachelor girls, of an arrangement they want to keep comfortable but temporary.
DIANE is dressed in bra and panties, preparing herself for an evening with HARRY. MARY follows her about the room, lost in envy and awe, handing DIANE the necessary lipstick or brush, doing up a button or fastening a necklace. MARY is the dull but orthodox assistant to DIANE’S mysterious ritual of beauty.
MARY
:
What is
