gathered her ferny flounces about them
They inappropriately passed
But Giovanni Franchi was there
He almost winked it at her
That he was there
His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets
The Philosopher had flung to him
And as she tripped by him
She guessed these all
All but the number of those toes
She made diurnal pilgrimage
To the trattoria
To eat
Trout that might have been trained for circuses
If minarets grew in miniature whirlpools
And mayonnaise that helped her to forget
That what is underneath need never matter
She put all minor riddles out of her
Such as
What was the under-cover of Franchi’s book
Telling to the plaid pattern of the table-cloth
Too shy to interrogate
She sent ambassadors
To the disciple
They returned
Oh rats
Quite manifest that Giovanni Franchi
Some semieffigy
Damned by scholiums
Knew no more how many toes—
Than Giovanni Bapini knew himself
Babies in Hospital
I
Small Elena
Of shrunken limbs
And ample sex
Who
Having filched
The atrophied
Woman-smile of your mother
Scatter it
On the eating unseen
Tuberculous
Inaudible hands
On the counter-pane
It might have been
Impossible
Fingers should be so long
Being so tiny
But Nature
Needing no microscope
In her laboratory
Found it just as easy
Marshalling imperceptible
Hosts
To bone of your arm
Among overlapping of lint
Attaining a dignity
Unworthy of your years
Two and a half!
II
Hail to you
Bad little boy
Lying
In bound beauty
Of only a broken leg
And thank you
For throwing
Your bricks on the floor
For the third time
And the smack
You gave me
For the thermometer
Delightfully male
Already gallant
You smooth the mackintosh
For Elena to sit on beside you
Her fragility
Being irresistibly for you
You are very wise
Precocious coquette
Who never learnt to talk
To look at him
Before
Your semi-imbecile
Eyes shut
It is not given to each of us
To be desired.
III
Tend
Do not touch
Apparent flowers
Of festering secret
And the fly-by-nights
Such little things
I cannot be your mother
There are already
So many ignorances
I am not guilty of.
At the Door of the House
A thousand women’s eyes
Riveted to the unrealisable
Scatter the wash-stand of the card-teller
Defiled marble of Carrara
On which she spreads
Color-picture maps of destiny
In the corner
Of an inconducive bed-room
“Impassioned
Doubly impassioned
Sad
You see these three cards
But here is the double Victory
And there is an elderly lady
Ill in whom you are concerned
This is the Devil
And these two skeletons
Are mortifications
You are going to make a journey
At evening about love
Here is the Man of the Heart
Turning his shoulders to a lady
Covered with tears about matrimony
At the door of your house
There is a letter about an affair
And a bed and a table
And this ace of spades turned upside-down
‘With respect’
Means that some man
Has well you know
Intentions little honorable
Here you are covered with tears
For a deception
The Man of the Heart
Is in thoughtfulness for a letter
He will make a journey at evening
And really lady
I should say
It will not be long before you see him
For there he is at the door of the house
And look
Here are you
And here is he
In life and thought
At the door of the house”
Muddled among the aniline brightness of the Tauro cards
The wheels with wings
The rows on rows of goblets
Passionate magenta blossoms
Hermits —bring luck—
Moons Prison-fortresses
Cudgels
A man cut in half
Means a deception
And the nude woman
Stands for the world
Those eyes
Of Petronilla Lucia Letizia
Felicita
Filomena Amalia
Orsola Geltrude Caterina Delfina
Zita Bibiana Tarsilla
Eufemia,
Looking for the little love-tale
That never came true
At the door of the house
The Effectual Marriage
Or, The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni
The door was an absurd thing
Yet it was passable
They quotidienly passed through it
It was this shape
Gina and Miovanni who they were God knows
They knew it was important to them
This being of who they were
They were themselves
Corporeally transcendentally consecutively
conjunctively and they were quite complete
In the evening they looked out of their two windows
Miovanni out of his library window
Gina from the kitchen window
From among his pots and pans
Where he so kindly kept her
Where she so wisely busied herself
Pots and Pans she cooked in them
All sorts of sialagogues
Some say that happy women are immaterial
So here we might dispense with her
Gina being a female
But she was more than that
Being an incipience a correlative
an instigation of the reaction of man
From the palpable to the transcendent
Mollescent irritant of his fantasy
Gina had her use Being useful
contentedly conscious
She flowered in Empyrean
From which no well-mated woman ever returns
Sundays a warm light in the parlor
From the gritty road on the white wall
anybody could see it
Shimmered a composite effigy
Madonna crinolined a man
hidden beneath her hoop
Ho for the blue and red of her
The silent eyelids of her
The shiny smile of her
Ding dong said the bell
Miovanni Gina called
Would it be fitting for you to tell
the time for supper
Pooh said Miovanni I am
Outside time and space
Patience said Gina is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish appropriately delectable
What had Miovanni made of his ego
In his library
What had Gina wondered among the pots and pans
One never asked the other
So they the wise ones eat their suppers in peace
Of what their peace consisted
We cannot say
Only that he was magnificently man
She insignificantly a woman who understood
Understanding what is that
To Each his entity to others
their idiosyncrasies to the free expansion
to the annexed their liberty
To man his work
To woman her love
Succulent meals and an occasional caress
So be it
It so seldom is
While Miovanni thought alone in the dark
Gina supposed that peeping she might see
A round light shining where his mind was
She never opened the door
Fearing that this might blind her
Or even
That she should see Nothing at all
So while he thought
She hung out of the window
Watching for falling stars
And when a star fell
She wished that still
Miovanni would love her to-morrow
And as Miovanni
Never gave any heed to the matter
He did
Gina was a woman
Who wanted everything
To be everything in woman
Everything everyway at once
Diurnally variegate
Miovanni always knew her
She was Gina
Gina who lent monogamy
With her fluctuant aspirations
A changeant consistency
Unexpected intangibilities
Miovanni remained
Monumentally the same
The same Miovanni
If he had become anything else
Gina’s world would have been at an end
Gina with no axis to revolve on
Must have dwindled to a full stop
In the mornings she dropped
Cool crystals
Through devotional fingers
Saccharine for his cup
And marketed
With a Basket
Trimmed with a red flannel flower
When she was lazy
She wrote a poem on the milk bill
The first strophe Good morning
The second Good night
Something not too difficult to
Learn by heart
The scrubbed smell of the white-wood table
Greasy cleanliness of the chopper board
The coloured vegetables
Intuited quality of flour
Crickly sparks of straw-fanned charcoal
Ranged themselves among her audacious happinesses
Pet simplicities of her Universe
Where circles were only round
Having no vices.
Human Cylinders
The human cylinders
Revolving in the enervating dusk
That wraps each closer in the mystery
Of singularity
Among the
