the more serious business
Of the battle-field
With the same incautious aloofness
Of intense occupation
That it snuffles the trail of the female
And the comfortable
Passing odors of love
Your genius
So much less in your brain
Than in your body
Reinforcing the hitherto negligible
Qualities
Of life
Deals so exclusively with
The vital
That it is equally happy expressing itself
Through the activity of pushing
Things
In the opposite direction
To that which they are lethargically willing to go
As in the amative language
Of the eyes
Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any—or all
Forms of creative idiosyncrasy
While the occasional snap
Of actual production
Stings the face of the public.
Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots
Latin Borghese
Houses hold virgins
The door’s on the chain
“Plumb streets with hearts”
“Bore curtains with eyes”
Virgins without dots1
Stare beyond probability
See the men pass
Their hats are not ours
We take a walk
They are going somewhere
And they may look everywhere
Men’s eyes look into things
Our eyes look out
A great deal of ourselves
We offer to the mirror
Something less to the confessional
The rest to Time
There is so much Time
Everything is full of it
Such a long time
Virgins may whisper
“Transparent nightdresses made all of lace”
Virgins may squeak
“My dear I should faint!”
Flutter . . … flutter . … flutter . …
. … “And then the man—”
Wasting our giggles
For we have no dots
We have been taught
Love is a god
White with soft wings
Nobody shouts
Virgins for sale
Yet where are our coins
For buying a purchaser
Love is a god
Marriage expensive
A secret well kept
Makes the noise of the world
Nature’s arms spread wide
Making room for us
Room for all of us
Somebody who was never
a virgin
Has bolted the door
Put curtains at our windows
See the men pass
They are going somewhere
Fleshes like weeds
Sprout in the light
So much flesh in the world
Wanders at will
Some behind curtains
Throbs to the night
Bait to the stars
Spread it with gold
And you carry it home
Against your shirt front
To a shaded light
With the door locked
Against virgins who
Might scratch
To You
The city
Wedged between impulse and unfolding
Bridged
By diurnal splintering
Of egos
Round
The aerial news-kiosk
Where you
Statically
Hob-nob
With a nigger
And a deaf-mute
Of introspection
Plopping finger
In Stephen’s ink
Made you hybrid-negro
A couple of manuscriptural erasures
And here we have your deaf-mute
Beseech him
He will never with-hold so
Completely
As the tattle of tongue-play
Or your incognito
Lit cavities in the face of the city
Open their glassy embrace to receive you
In your mask of unborn ebony
And the silence of your harangue
The tight-rope stretched above commotion
Frays to tow
To the step tentative
fend shadows are yours for the taking
Where the mono-rabble
Plays the one-stringed banjo
On the noise of its ragged heart
Inaudible
In the shattering city
Alien as your aboriginal
In the levelling dirt—
Giovanni Franchi
The threewomen who all walked
In the same dress
And it had falling ferns on it
Skipped parallel
To the progress
Of Giovanni Franchi
Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked
Flickeringly as he flacked them
His wrists explained things
Infectiously by way of his adolescence
His adolescence was all there was of him
Whatever was left was rather awkward
His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees
Descended to the fallacious nobility
Of his first pair of trousers
They were tubular flapped friezily
The colour of coppered mustard
What matter
Were they not the first
No others could ever be the first again
The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen
Began fading as she thought of it
Tea-table problems for insane asylums
Are démodé
Démodé
Allow us to rely on our instincts
The threewomen was composed of three instincts
Each sniffing divergently directed draughts
The first instinct first again may
renascent gods save us from the enigmatic
penetralia of Firstness
Was to be faithful to a man first
The second to be loyal to herself first
She would have to find which self first
The third which might as well have been first
Was to find out how many toes the
philosopher Giovanni Bapini had first
Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born
You imagine what he looked like
Looked it as nearly as he could as the
philosopher looked
His articulations were excellent
Still where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous
Giovanni Franchi was merely pale
His acolytian sincerity
The sensitive down among his freckles
Fell in with the patriotic souls of flags
Red white and green flags filliping piazzas
When the “National Idea” arrived on the Milan Express
He scuttled winsomely
To its distribution from a puffer
For the declaration of War
Continually cutting off an angle from Paszkowski’s
Through plate-glass swingings
To look as busy bodily
As the philosopher’s brain was
As Giovanni Bapini importuned mobs
From monumental gums
To the sparky detritus
From the hurried cigarette
Of his disciple
Whose papa and mama kept a trattoria
Audaciously squatting right opposite the Pitti Palace
The Pitti Palace however stolid could hardly help noticing
Being an aristocrat it went on looking
As plainly piled up as ever
The Pitti Palace has never been known to mention the trattoria
Or mention Giovanni Franchi
Sitting in it
At a book
It could not see from that distance
Giovanni watching the munchers supporting his parents
With an eye
On assuring himself
Of their sufficient impression
By erudition
He was so young
That explains so much
No book ever explained what to be young is
But they look so much more important for that
Giovanni was in continuous exstacy
Induced by the imposing look of them
When Giovanni Bapini spoke of them
He could not tell
How completely more precious
Would be such knowledge
As how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had
Now the threewomen
For pity’s sake
Let us think of her as she to save time
Seeing the minor Giovanni
Sitting at the major Giovanni’s feet
Made sure he must be counting his toes
All to the contrary he was picking the philosopher’s brains
Happy in the security that when he had done
He would still be youthful enough to sort out his own
He listened at the elder’s lips
That taught him of earthquakes and women
Of women⸻⸻⸻
His manners were abominable
He would kill a woman
Quite inconspicuously it is true
And neglect to attend her funeral
I mean the older man
And what he told
Giovanni Franchi
About these pernicious persons
Was so extremely good for him
It entirely spoilt his first love-affair
To such an extent it never came off
We have read of
Trattoria meaning eating house.
Piazzas or squares
The Pitti Palace enormous
And Paszkowski’s for beer
All are in Firenze
Firenze is Florence
Some think it is a woman with flowers in her hair
But no it is a city with stones on the streets
Giovanni Bapini often said
Everybody in Firenze knows me
And everybody did
Excepting—That is she didn’t
She never knew what he was
Or how he was himself
Yet she uniquely was the one
To speculate upon the number of his toes
The days growing longer
Fulfilling her of curiosity
She made a moth’s-net
Of metaphor and miracles
And on the incandescent breath of civilizations
She chased by moon-and-morn light
Philosopher’s toes
As virginal as had he never worn them
Clear of “white marks mean money”
All quicks and cores
They fluttered to her fantasy
Fell into her lap
While she
