with the spider to threaten the trail-bruised
white skin of the girl who was searching
for her brother, I balanced on the limb
with the leopard who had to be content
with Negroes and double-crossers
and never tasted but a slash of hero flesh.
Even after double-pay I deserted
with the bearers, believing every rumour
the wind brought from the mountain pass.
The old sorceress, the spilled wine,
the black cards convinced me:
the timeless laws must not be broken.
When the lovers got away with the loot
of new-valued life or love, or bought
themselves a share in time by letting
the avalanche seal away for ever
the gold goblets and platters, I knew
a million ways the jungle might have been
meaner and smarter. As the red sun
came down on their embrace I shouted
from my velvet seat, Get them, get them,
to all the animals drugged with anarchy and happiness.
August 6, I96J
D E S T I N Y
I want your warm body to disappear
politely and leave me alone in the bath
because I want to consider my destiny.
Destiny! why do you find me in this bathtub,
idle, alone, unwashed, without even
the intention of washing except at the last moment?
Why don't you find me at the top of a telephone pole,
repairing the lines from city to city?
Why don't you find me riding a horse through Cuba,
a giant of a man with a red machete?
Why don't you find me explaining machines
to underprivileged pupils, negroid Spaniards,
happy it is not a course in creative writing?
Come back here, little warm body,
it's time for another day.
Destiny has fled and I settle for you
who found me staring at you in a store
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?
Q U E E N V I C T O R I A A N D M E
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 2oth 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
I 143
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
1 44 I
T H E N E W S T E P
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, recordplayer, 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.
I 145
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
