Bedouin of the London Evening (6 page)

It’s the café and the boredom, in the semi-dark

People have a certain rank elegance

And the dirt-encrusted street with its great jar of water

Keeps my blood too fresh and truculent for work.

All these Roman fops going by, the shuffling,

The dripping waterjar and the dark café

…built for stealing people…

And the walls are full of musk, it’s baked into them.

The temptation to live! Even a bad conversation…

In a street that’s built for boredom

And odorous with water. When there’s less time

(My life, my work, my hopes!) every step leads to an assignation.

It’s the élan of café life on a hot night,

The street that’s full of modern love-talk, like a room,

It’s the jade-breath of the waterjar…that is mortality

For the blood that is too insolent for work.

Europe is all steam and leaves and love-affairs!

Old streets – they’re bathrooms of steam and water

Where Hypnos follows me all day in a silk dressing-gown,

Like two old bores we move through the great months of rain.

Suppose I’m coming from my love-affair…

While the steam-heated rain pours down,

And yawning takes the wax and starch out of my skin,

It’s the last straw having to describe the night

Again in detail to my heart – as if it wasn’t there,

When Hypnos, like a twentieth-century bachelor

Bored easily, is lying full length on my bed

– With the effrontery to add to his art the spice

Of fanning me to sleep – with sheets of my own verse.

It is among the bins and dormitories of cities

Where the busker wins his bread

By turning music on a spit, and the heavens

Have the dirt of the great sty upon their sides,

That one goes to gormandise upon Escape!

Where alleys are so narrow that the Fates

Like meatporters can scarcely pass

With their awkward burden in its muslin bandages,

And carry off the rabble safely to their graves;

Where every shadow opens a bordel

At sunset, as decay moves

Into cloakrooms of blue velvet in red cheese;

These are the last of the great kitchens!

And your soul knows half the flavour

Lies underfoot in dirty flagstones,

When like a chef it makes a point of bringing in

To show before you dine – Escape,

Still active in a net,

Auroras, icy champagnes upon its wings!

Thinking we were safe – insanity!

We went in to make love. All the same

Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.

Then in the gloom…

…And who does not know that pair of shutters

With the awkward hook on them

All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom

We set about acquiring one another

Urgently! But on a temporary basis

Only as guests – just guests of one another’s senses.

But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing

Because the bed of cold, electric linen

Happens to be illicit….

To make love as well as that is ruinous.

Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us

That without permanent intentions

You have absolutely no protection

– If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,

The concurring deep love of the heart

Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms

Great city, filled with wind and dust!

Bedouin of the London evening,

On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.

And like a medium who falls into a trance

So deep, she can be scratched to death

By her Familiar – at its leisure!

I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown

While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.

I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown

My private modern life has gone to waste.

This lane at zenith; when its hair is warm.

Here’s the magician with his Pedigree of Snouts

Whose ransack shimmers after him.

And here’s the lair in music trousseau where his lout’s

Foot beat out a bright bed. The Atlas stuffs his shoes

With tussore. A dark animal

Pulls August out of the hedge, the linctus dropping as it chews,

Eyes him with the clear gog of Lucifer, the edible

Hot silk of the dream pasture in its mouth.

Geography lays eggs and pearls.

Thirst! And the ceiling advances with luminous hulls.

Panes of weather are left flashing in the path;

Quagmarks of angels in the mud,

The blue thrash of the Jesus fairy. And the youth

Detonates this spoor to drive the Magnifico in thud

And glare of blades against his ear;

The heavenly quops vamped by the tender oilskin of the drum!

His breast reports the code, as a snake dines off some rare

Tattoo its literate satin muscle cannot name.

Archbrute of quadrillion Kingbeats!

But the north flies a magnetic blue roan cloud

Whose touchwaters on the scented dirt of the sphere

Set – in jay’s wing fathoms. And Mud

Looks up through this aquarium of rain, from her

Queasy seance under the grope of the great knotted lips

Of riverpike, whose tarnished flesh

Drinks the umber hangings of the bottom. This boy who clips

Himself a Dynasty of Wings – is hers! Hers to the ghost rash

On his lily-clapping vellum, that strokes her lie to death.

We were the city’s young, and our veins

If they ran pale from the bad food

Even so they carried the infernos of its moods,

For we were the children of the rotting peacock

Of a passer-by, seen in a mist of scorching bitumen.

Oh you bound homeward when the cloud

Of gold gas shone behind the house,

With a captured insect, once half Helium

Now only spurs and gauze,

And the green liquor pool in jars of glass…

We were not less whose city like an alcohol

Spoke hotly to the artery; and we already

Knew love’s streets – where at the fall

Of thermal, phosphorescent dusk

There is a drop that goes down sheer to Hell.

Those evenings you were mutinous

Against the tyranny of kitchen tables where

The flat iron cools its mirror of blue ore

And grip of hot rag,

And the old blanket smokes like humus,

We were the young, derisive metropolitans

Soon to be mashed flat as a wet coalsack by skies

Of ochre, full of malice, coating the trees with emulsion,

And you would have to drag for our disgust in sewers,

And break the cobwebs reaching an illusion.

Now like a gambler on an errand

Of my wasted youth, when gutter and heavens

Were my lottery, and my estate

A shirt of water-lotus that the night wind

Loved to rock as I went to do my gambling

Alone at dusk in the dark city

To out-bid Eternity – with nothing

But a blouse of lilies flooding my lapel

A wallet stuffed with fever for my stake,

All night until the early hours when stowaways

Will grope for the unknown and illustrate

Their clothes with lustrous bruises as they go aboard

And all the ropes and fabrics of a boat

Are heavy with cold nectars in the dawn,

Creation, glimmering and surly underfoot,

And Egypt drowsy on a cake of opium,

I went with nothing but the shirt upon my back

To cast lots with the Infinite,

And my bid was the blouse that rocks

On gamblers with a linen sail all night.

There is no scholarship to lane and zephyr

Like a boorish, pampered youth!

I have no documents to hawk – sinner and loafer

In the airy darkness – but on a London night

When boats lie up with jewelled nostrils, and under

Sheets of dust and satin, water is in slumber,

Inquire of my ability to be last off the streets

When I am molten, stupid, dangerous,

Under an alley’s aspic wall with bullying confederates

In arms, love, lies, and law-breakings.

And for my knowledge of the dawn

Examine me upon the solitary power-drunk return

From the nocturnal city; walking when the world

Is marvellous, upon a country road

My boot – that’s plump with mildew and uncorseted –

The first to tread the lane when it is dug out

Fresh and dripping from the ether, and the spade

Laid by – heavenly crust still luminous upon it!

Delinquent! with bedlam’s pulses sobbing in my limbs

And tomorrow – all gold bruises

On the rise! Test me (while I am fresh from sins

And villainy) upon the conduct of the zephyr

At the hour he leaves the atmosphere to join the finches

In the path, and wash his fresh wings in the dust.

You, who would tame with toolbag or certificate

My shudder…as the east

Drinks diamonds, and the world’s born blazing underfoot!

Surgeon and robber learn their touch in the great city,

But I am after heavenly spoil, and it is

As a gloveless trespasser that I desire supremacy.

And the revolutionary – half-drugged by the wet trees

In Paris in low spirits moves on

Through the scent-kilns full of gnats

He’ll be ruined – his throat rots with happiness.

They’re dirty like a lodging-house, the waterfronts,

But the dust is seductive to him

The jasmine atmosphere and hot drip of the thunder

That crushes Paris bone by bone.

Zut! He can hear modern life going on!

Who lives off the sight of a Paris street!

Down here, it’s dark as a medicine,

It’s April – everything anointed and caked.

And his malaise is fabulous.…

The dirt beds of the trees and the hot dust!

It’s lethal to patrol here, brainsick and odious,

On the alluring quays he’s rotten with happiness.

We come into the café at dawn,

There are waterfogs, and civilisation is white

…if you knew the exotic disgust that grips me

After another bestial night

As we come in, broken; dark with inks and dusts and gases

Like those whose private apartment is the street.

After an all-night conversation

When the street-wind hangs on snarling to your coat,

If you knew my (half erotic) convulsion of loathing

For the night. (I’m like a sleeper

When his mouth is stopped up

By some terrible mud-crust the dream has crammed there

And the soul goes pressing up against

Trying to scream with hydrophobia – and can only murmur.

Some love-thought turns his mouth to blood with longing

Only a moment later.) In the workman’s café

If you knew the almost voluptuous sense of frustration

When you’re broken… And the morning’s alcoholic as a lily.

I was plying my trade in the street,

It was a rainy agate twilight

And my eyes were half lid…but my town-bred soul

Was tempted and within an inch of giving in.

I was at work upon a suburb of my brain,

An ultra-treacherous idea was in its private room there

And I was closing in – with the ink streaming off my brow!

But my soul attentive to the agate oxygen.

Crates of glass and water had been dumped down by the weather,

Overhead a last skylight opened in the Koh-i-noor

– A whole civilisation was loose, bully and vixen

Moving along, roasting hot, ready for anything!

And – odium – I was in the chien-loup

Of the Latin Quarter of my brain

Where certain dark yellow hours go by

…that lead off surreptitiously into eternity.

Academic! Hack! Vulgarian!

You mistook the nature of your calling. Poets are only at work,

With an agate daylight going through the street,

When they live, dream,
bleed
– within an inch of giving in to art.

I have a quarrel with the world

At music in my breast

To walk the shabby thrilling twilight of the street

And to be stewed in fogs that stick

To me, as a tramp’s nest

All lice and dews, sticks to his clothes…

Rouses my soul to beat the velvet sinews

Of her thickets! To bear

Old toothmarks bitten deep into my side

Where January can always fit his blade

And halve me with the saw

Again, like sorcerers, while
living
…

Goads my invisible to cuff her instrument

My breast! To stoop and grow

Hard callouses where the black weather

Rests its knuckles on me like a sulky Pasha

Upon the brow

Of his pet slave, grating magnificent rings…

Makes my tenant thunder my complaint

Upon her velvet ropes!

And yet…as powerful but indolent composers

Will only work when bailiffs pound their doors,

Where my musician lodges

I need Adversity to break its claws!