Solemn and unsurprised
and clumsily
lapped by insensitive maternity
it lies
waving its brand new feet
and feeds
its mongrel heart on Benger’s food
for infants
Enter Esau Penfold
I
Feeling his need for such a book as this
I wrote the “Infant Aesthete” for
my little Esau
— — — — —
Patricia Penfold’s preface Fresh
from the publishers
the “author’s
copy” circulating at the small
and informal reception
for wiseacres and waisted-women
“To view” Esau and his authoress
in their accurate draperies for Lady Bliss
’s classical costume ball
The boy one bare arm
thrust through a gossamer
toga of Tyrian rose
is holding out an orb
—There is a portrait of him in that pose
labelled “Esau holding an orb”
The guests spreading their gleaming
faces forward to convey
that they
remember nothing since the Garden of Eden
the garish innocence
of adult guilt
in the presence of children
One takes the little Esau on his knee
to listen to his watch
and absentmindedly
discourses on the differential calculus
while an African explorer
explains how easily
he might catch lions if he wished
“It only needs kindness and a turn of the wrist”
The matrons
shaking their bustles
with a slight impatience
that one so singled out as he
by British culture
might gain competitively
on their own offspring
decide to “put themselves”
upon the order list
for “Infant Aesthetes”
The fire flicks from the
fifteenth-century
andirons and the ruby eyes
of Buddha
On treasures of Tibet
the “trousered” draperies
of a wood faced Virgin from the Netherlands
The golden wings
of Florentine angels
and a piece of Ming
“Everything” as the five year old Esau
suavely smiles
to a professor of anthropology
“to delight the heart of a child”
In the Penfold residence
on Ridover Square
II
In Kilburn terrace
if you know where that is? — —
Exodus’ child
is propped upon a chair
of chestnut cretonne
printed with maroon
acanthus leaves and big buff water-lillies
and told to “hush”
while thrust
into her baby-pelisse
of ruby plush
under an oleograph
of “The Cat’s Fancy Ball” — —
hung on a sky-blue wall
Ova Begins to Take Notice
A faggot of instincts
that within the year
rises
the caryatid of an idea
Two elongations of its will
arm—crave
the curious glare
virile
behind unravelable wire
The staring baby
stumbles to the fire
Her consciousness
sluggish to raucous surfaces
of necessities
quickens
to colour—thrusts
of the quintessent light
— — until a woman’s
ineludable claws of dominion
lift her above the Elysian
fields of flame
in a receding
prison
of muscular authority
an agency
for displacing
the finer aspects of the objective
in her sight
and turning to shame
the nucleus
— in infantile impotence —
of Primeval Right
The suctional soul
clings to the vari—pinct universe
With its reverse
of increate shadow
into which all
elating shows
recede or roll
A crimson ball
bouncing
to her spontaneous psalms
of happiness
rolls
into non — being
under the aera — ivy’s
diaper of rain — pocked dust
She must
make her a rose
out of red thread
but red
ness is inadequate
to the becoming of a rose
— The — red — reel — rolls — —
The prismatic sun — show
of father’s physic bottles
pierced by the light of day
extinguishes!
as she is carried away
Her entity
she projects
into these sudden colours
for self identification
is lost in recurrent annihilation
with an old desperate unsurprise
Her emotions rise
from no beginning
They are worn
with racial patience
So she is patient
with the temperate under —
tones of hostile bodies
that stand still
and those
that move
in fretful thunder —
— functions of their
irate Importances
become defined —
Nurse’s
draperies are resigned
The mother
draws near unnaturally
as if to assert her dignity
after some
outrage
that seems to rustle
among her draperies
drawn across her thighs
to bunch over her bustle
Jostled
between revolving
armoured towers
carrying
high up on the top
two little spy holes
eyeing — —
and arms like signals
flapping and cuffing
the heavy upholstered
stuffing
of these
two women’s netherbodies
The child
whose wordless
thoughts
grow like visionary plants
finds
nothing objective new
and only words
mysterious
Sometimes a new word comes to her
she looks before her
and watches
for its materialization
“Iarrhea”
Two years of her initiation
to light and darkness — —
and another
baby lies
in the young mother’s
arms of indignation
And it is carefully attended to
but all this passing to —
and—fro of hands
does not weave
brightness about the baby
hands that use
the same things too often
and nothing bright
comes of their use
Over the new—born
in the bassinet
the armoured towers
are bending
in iron busks
of curved corsets
consulting — —
And in her ear
a half inaudible—an
iridescent hush
forms “iarrhea”
“It is
quite green” She hears
The cerebral
mush convolving in her skull
an obsessional
colour—fetish
veers
to the souvenir
of the delirious ball
deleted
in the ivied
dust
lets fall
an optic—ray
upon the cat’s—eyes horse—shoe
pinned to a bended bust
And instantly
this fragmentary
simultaneity
of ideas
embodies
the word
A
lucent
iris
shifts
its
irradiate
interstice
glooms and relumes
on an orb of verdigris
An unreal
globe terrestial
of olive—jewel
dilates — —
— — evaporates
into the Increate
And as it vanishes
she crawls into the macabre
shadowiness
upon the floor
under the white valances
of the furnitures
to look for it
She is pulled out by her leg
Opposed Aesthetics
As the arrested artists
of the masses
whose child faces
turned upon Beauty
the puny light
of their immobile recognition
made moon—flowers out of muck
and things desired
out of their tenuous soul—stuff
Until the Ruling Bluff
demanded a hell—full
of labour
for half a belly—full
So did the mongrel—girl
of Noman’s land
coerce the shy
Spirit of Beauty
from excrements and physic—
While Esau of Ridover Square
absorbs the erudite idea
that Beauty is nowhere
except posthumously to itself
in the antique
And trains
the common manifestations
of creation
to flatten
before his eyes
to one vast monopattern
Marriage Boxes
Oh God
That men and women
having undertaken to vanquish one another
should be allowed
to shut themselves up in hot boxes and breed
Spirits of prey
ceaselessly
on the watch in their cruel privacy
Seizing upon occasion
for crippling the personal
to test the law of the craftiest for survival
with that innate will to emerge victorious
present in every human enterprise
until at last the vanquished mate dies
of modification
The days
of the Penfolds and the Exodi
in their respective roles
drip into years
with that perilous
multiplication of petty shocks
so much advertised
against
by the American manufacturers
of india—rubber soles
To the Penfolds
Culture has thrown
its bone
of contention
for the passions to chew on
—so that they shall not howl and bite—
Each one is in the right
according to a different school of accepted philosophy
and eventually
they subside into the pre—polemical silence
of creation
Under the virginia creeper
creeping over
the Exodus’
home
the shocks of intimate impact
of the instinctive
murderer and pamperer
of Jesus
rattle its sockets
Exodus has nothing but his pockets
to impress
his rabid rose of the hedges
while for her redress
she can flaunt the whole of England in his foreign face
It would please us
to look upon this face of Exodus
for it is exceeding beautiful
but this means nothing to the undutiful
woman she being exceeding—
ly short sighted
All forms are the same nought to her
only she had gathered from her literature
that men ought to be fair
and as all women
who have not got the world to choose from
marry in an hallucinatory
conviction
that the best man they can get
will yet
redye his soul in the matrimonial
vats of constant suasion
to the requisite tint—
She suffered a savage irritation
that this jew
should not invest himself automatically
with her prejudices of a superior
insulation
at the merest hint—
Psychic Larva
The head
of the child of Exodus
—reaches
to the level of an abdominal
moroseness
—The moronic womb
from which
we gather our involuntary flesh
hovers
antagonistically
over the child at mother’s knee
And erodes her
with psychic-larva
from an eruptional impotence
of offense—
—rolling upon her
To the
