Poetry

the basket”

In the evening
the armoured towers are sitting
round the surprise
—They look as if they will not be sitting there long⁠—
They ask it⁠—
“Have you peeped in the basket?”

Ova looking
partakingly at the father
anxious not to do wrong
“No”
“Ho” Snaps the father
“you opened that surprise
under my eyes”

Jumping out of chairs
“Liar”
makes a lot of noise

She is turned into a liar
by father
They push her
out of the front door with their hands

Her head expands
There is nothing
she knows how to expect from these big bodies
who hustle her through demeaning duties
in humiliation
and without animation

A coolness rising
from the rainy gravel
damp⁠—smelling friendliness of the dark
allays her sudden fever
She has left behind her forever
Liar whatever
it is
and Japanese fishes

She decides to travel

A hand upon her shoulder
jolts her
with mocking laughter
bolts her
to smoulder
once more
behind the door

Illumination

Ova is standing
alone in the garden

The high⁠—skies
have come gently upon her
and all their
steadfast light is shining out of her

She is conscious
not through her body but through space

This saint’s⁠—prize
this indissoluble bliss
to be carried like a forgetfullness
into the long nightmare

Contraction

She is contracting
to the enveloping
plasm of uneasiness
in which she is involved with the big bodies

The garden
the child’s
first place of purity
is become defiled

an egg is smashed
a horrible
aborted contour
a yellow murder
in a viscous pool

She knows not Time yet
it lies there
for a thousand years
of return to puzzle
over a defrauded race of chickens
pecking the gravel in unconcern

The Gift

Somewhat above the level
of the entrailed anger
of the mother
the pockets of the Father
invisible⁠—
depth
—interminable
from whence spring riches
and a sullen
economic war

houses and food and fire
proceed from them
and over them
he crows continually

Proximity
to Ova’s skulled mentality
of money which magically
is life

He tells her
he is a good Father
his child must obey him
should he choose to do so
he can bestow
upon her whatever she pray him

Heseems a sovereign
the maximum
of money
A golden octopus
grasping
She is asking
for a sovereign
to buy a circus universe

Laughing
he gives her a shining coin

She is exalted
in spontaneous knowledge of beauty

She confronts the solution of her destiny
and sudden the potentiality
of achievement
through her august parent

“I will buy ‘all this’ my sovereign
The flower seller
is bewildered⁠—

Nurse distrusts

She thrusts
out the open nacreous palm of her hand
that they may understand

“Ga‑aarn —you little fool
who’re you a gittin at?
That’s
a new farthing!”

She comes
to a curb⁠—stone
a woman is sitting upon
beyond
a rampant radiance
Of April jonquil
Gala yellow

Fa⁠—how evil a Father must be
to burst a universe by getting
so fa⁠—r into a sovereign

Ova Accepts the Popular Estimate of Humanity

Press the cerebellum
into phantom
moulds of idealism

and no matter
what ocular
and intellectual contact with phenomena
occur⁠—
Grey matter
is addled forever

Ova accepts Christ
as the sacrificial
prototype
of the laboriously elect
sect

notwithstanding
that the maternal christian
is inflicting

Him upon her
as a spiritual bludgeon
threatening⁠—

And the vaguely disgusting
inquietudes of the flesh surrounding
her she also accepts
as she is bidden
as hidden
immortalities
that ripen
for divine destinies

Religious Instruction

In mixed marriages
it is mostly the custom
for female children
to adhere to the maternal religion

While the Father presides over
the mystical prattle with ironical
commentary from his arm⁠—chair

But by whichever
religious route
to brute
reality
our forebears speed us

(Perfection
being an obligation
shoved on to
the next generation)

There is always a pair
of idle adult
accomplices in duplicity
to impose upon their brood
ideals
erected upon such increate altitudes
that Man
in falling from contemplation
of a more simulacrum
has soused himself (in blood
since Time began)

Jehovah
—exemplar par excellence
of megalomania⁠—
the Whole Old Testament
of butcherly chastisement
to coerce humanity
to an “assumed acceptance”
of an abstract idea

And that Christ
came with his light
of toilless lilies
to say “Fear
not it is I”

And bowed the ocean tossed
—with a poet’s feet
which being dead
are suspended over⁠—head
neat⁠—
ly crossed
in anguish
and wounded with red
varnish

From these
slow⁠—drying bloods of mysticism
mysteriously
the something⁠—soul emerges
miserably

an instinct (of economy)
in every race
for reconstructing debris
has planted a face
in outer darkness

---

The lonely peering eye
of humanity
looked into the Néant
— —and turned away

X

Ova’s consciousness
impulsive to commit itself to justice
—to arise and walk
its innate straight way
out of the
accidence of circumstance

collects the levitate chattels
of its will
and makes for the
magnetic horizon of liberty
with the soul’s foreverlasting
opposition
to disintegration

So this child of Exodus
with her heritage of emigration
often
“sets out to seek her fortune”
in her turn
trusting to terms of literature
dodging the breeders’ determination
not to return “entities sent on consignment”
by their maker Nature
except in a condition
of moral
effacement

Lest Paul and Peter
never
notice the creatures
ever had had Fathers
and Mothers

They were disgraced in their duty
should such spirits
take an express passage
through the family bodies
to arrive at Eternity
as lovely as they originally
promised

So on whatever day
she chooses “to run away”
the very
street corners of Kilburn
close in upon Ova
to deliver her
into the hands of her procreators

Oracle of civilization
“Thou shalt not live by dreams alone
but by every discomfort
that proceedeth out of
legislation⁠—

The Social Status of Exodus

Out of the hands of God
the aboriginal
muscle-pattern
with its ominously
cruciform completion
in view of propagation
indulged its uniform
imputation
of the image and likeness
of Deity⁠— —
to satiety

and through varying civilizations
experimented in deformations
of contour
while fashion
and fanaticism disputed
with passion
the incompatibility
with his dignity

of exposing man
to the contemplation
of the insignia
of his origin
and continuity

Theological tinkers
and serious thinkers
attacked the problem
of dissubstantiation
— — — — —

Some said
“It were better to cast it off from us utterly”
And some took a plank of wood and set it
about with nails and lay upon it
saying “This will make us forget it”

Spiritual drapers
Popes and fakirs and shakers
decked it
out with oblivion
and let it
appear
to disappear

But to no effect
For men of a happy⁠—go⁠—lucky vulgarity

relegated
this jew⁠—jaw of general invective
to a hole and corner secretive
popularity
And absurd
as it may seem
the “unprintable word”
is impossible to erase from a vocabulary

And there arose another
greater than Jehovah
The Tailor — —
— —the stitches of whose seams
He is unworthy to unloose

Out of the hands of Exodus
the Oxonian
seeming
a sunbeam that has chanced to stray
into a cut⁠—away
(Gentlemen
wear
clothes
with an easy air
of debonair
inevitability)

Clothed and shod
the tailor’s concept of the man made God
(Sartorial peril of the yellow race
looking so out of place)
peoples the sod — —

Under the shears
of the prestidigitator cutter
(who achieves
the unachievable Act of the Apostles)
the cruciform scourge
of conscience
disappears⁠—
in utter
bifurcate dissimulation
leaving
only those inevitable yet more or less circumspect
creasings
in the “latest thing in trouserings”
—or serge
And man
at last assumes his self⁠—respect

And man with his amorphous nature

who defied
the protoform of Who made him
but has not denied
Him
obeyed
the tailor who remade him
and denies him

He is despised
this ostracized
fancier of travestied torsoes
weaver of fig⁠—leaves out of cheviot
who staked the plot
of manhood in his nobler form

The gently born
they turn away

from the tailor
Who knows?
“Man that is born of woman”
Perhaps he chose
an occupation all too feminine
— — — — — —

Neither is this the reason that they give
(Thou shalt not look upon the face of God and live!)

Gertrude Stein

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word

Endnotes

1. Marriage portions. ↩

Colophon