The Lost Lunar Baedeker (7 page)

It is ambient               And it is in your eyes

Something shiny        Something only for you

                                      Something that I must not see

It is in my ears            Something very resonant

Something that you must not hear

                                     Something only for me

Let us be very jealous

Very suspicious

Very conservative

Very cruel

Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations

Disorb inviolate egos

Where two or three are welded together

They shall become god

— — — — — — —

Oh that's right

Keep away from me   Please give me a push

Don't let me understand you   Don't realise me

Or we might tumble together

Depersonalized

Identical

Into the terrific Nirvana

Me you — you — me

XIV

Today

Everlasting   passing   apparent   imperceptible

To you

I bring the nascent virginity of

—Myself   for the moment

No love   or the other thing

Only the impact of lighted bodies

Knocking sparks off each other

In chaos

XV

Seldom   Trying for Love

Fantasy dealt them out as gods

Two or three men   looked only human

But you alone

Superhuman    apparently

I had to be caught in the weak eddy

Of your drivelling humanity

                          To love you most

XVI

We might have lived together

In the lights of the Arno

Or gone apple stealing under the sea

Or played

Hide and seek in love and cob-webs

And a lullaby on a tin-pan

And      talked till there were no more tongues

To talk with

And never have known any better

XVII

I don't care

Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to

Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride

Or what would look at me

If the shutters were not shut

Red      a warm colour on the battle-field

Heavy on my knees as a counterpane

Count counter

I counted    the fringe of the towel

Till two tassels clinging together

Let the square room fall away

From a round vacuum

Dilating with my breath

XVIII

Out of the severing

Of hill from hill

The interim

Of star from star

The nascent

Static

Of night

XIX

Nothing so conserving

As cool cleaving

Note of the Q H U

Clear carving

Breath-giving

Pollen smelling

Space

White telling

Of slaking

Drinkable

Through fingers

Running water

Grass haulms

Grow to

Leading astray

Of fireflies

Aerial quadrille

Bouncing

Off one another

Again conjoining

In recaptured pulses

Of light

You too

Had something

At that time

Of a green-lit glow-worm

— — — — — — —

Yet slowly drenched

To raylessness

In rain

XX

Let Joy go solace-winged

To flutter whom she may concern

XXI

I store up nights against you

Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares

— — — — — — — — — —

Stack noons

Curled to the solitaire

Core of the

Sun

XXII

Green things grow

Salads

For the cerebral

Forager's revival

Upon bossed bellies

Of mountains

Rolling in the sun

And flowered flummery

Breaks

To my silly shoes

In ways without you

I go

Gracelessly

As things go

XXIII

Laughter in solution

Stars in a stare

Irredeemable pledges

Of pubescent consummations

Rot

To the recurrent moon

Bleach

To the pure white

Wickedness of pain

XXIV

The procreative truth of Me

Petered out

In pestilent

Tear drops

Little lusts and lucidities

And prayerful lies

Muddled with the heinous acerbity

Of your street-corner smile

XXV

Licking the Arno

The little rosy

Tongue of Dawn

Interferes with our eyelashes

— — — — — — — —

We twiddle to it

Round and round

Faster

And turn into machines

Till the sun

Subsides in shining

Melts some of us

Into abysmal pigeon-holes

Passion has bored

In warmth

Some few of us

Grow to the level of cool plains

Cutting our foot-hold

With steel eyes

XXVI

Shedding our petty pruderies

From slit eyes

We sidle up

To Nature

— — — that irate pornographist

XXVII

Nucleus     Nothing

Inconceivable concept

Insentient repose

The hands of races

Drop off from

Immodifiable plastic

The contents

Of our ephemeral conjunction

In aloofness from Much

Flowed to approachment of — — — —

NOTHING

There was a man and a woman

In the way

While the Irresolvable

Rubbed with our daily deaths

Impossible eyes

XXVIII

The steps go up for ever

And they are white

And the first step   is the last white

Forever

Coloured    conclusions

Smelt    to synthetic

Whiteness

Of my

Emergence

And I am burnt quite white

In the climacteric

Withdrawal of your sun

And wills and words all white

Suffuse

Illimitable monotone

White   where there is nothing to see

But a white towel

Wipes the cymophanous sweat

—Mist rise of living—

From your

Etiolate body

And the white dawn

Of your     New Day

Shuts down on me

Unthinkable     that white over there

— — — Is smoke from your house

XXIX

Evolution     fall foul of

Sexual equality

Prettily miscalculate

Similitude

Unnatural selection

Breed such sons and daughters

As shall jibber at each other

Uninterpretable cryptonyms

Under the moon

Give them some way of braying brassily

For caressive calling

Or to homophonous hiccoughs

Transpose the laugh

Let them suppose that tears

Are snowdrops or molasses

Or anything

Than human insufficiencies

Begging dorsal vertebrae

Let meeting be the turning

To the antipodean

And Form     a blurr

Anything

Than seduce them

To the one

As simple satisfaction

For the other

Let them clash together

From their incognitoes

In seismic orgasm

For far further

Differentiation

Rather than watch

Own-self distortion

Wince in the alien ego

XXX

In some

Prenatal plagiarism

Fœtal buffoons

Caught tricks

— — — — —

From archetypal pantomime

Stringing emotions

Looped aloft

— — — —

For the blind eyes

That Nature knows us with

And the most of Nature      is green

— — — — — — — — — —

What guaranty

For the proto-form

We fumble

Our souvenir ethics to

— — — — — — —

XXXI

Crucifixion

Of a busy-body

Longing to interfere so

With the intimacies

Of your insolent isolation

Crucifixion

Of an illegal ego's

Eclosion

On your equilibrium

Caryatid      of an idea

Crucifixion

Wracked arms

Index extremities

In vacuum

To the unbroken fall

XXXII

The moon is cold

Joannes

Where the Mediterranean — — — — —

XXXIII

The prig of passion — — — —

To your professorial paucity

Proto-plasm was raving mad

Evolving us — — —

XXXIV

Love — — — the preeminent litterateur

III

CORPSES AND GENIUSES
 (POEMS 1919–1930) 

Passport photo of Loy, 1920s

O Hell

To clear the drifts of spring

Of our forebear's excrements

And bury the subconscious archives

Under unaffected flowers

      Indeed—

Our person is a covered entrance to infinity

Choked with the tatters of tradition

Goddesses and Young Gods

Caress the sanctity of Adolescence

In the shaft of the sun.

The Dead

We have flowed out of ourselves

Beginning on the outside

That shrivable skin

Where you leave off

Of infinite elastic

Walking the ceiling

Our eyelashes polish stars

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle

Of a descendant

We spit up our passions in our grand-dams

Fixing the extension of your reactions

Our shadow lengthens

In your fear

You are so old

Born in our immortality

Stuck fast as Life

In one impalpable

Omniprevalent Dimension

We are turned inside out

Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs

Street lights footle in our ocular darkness

Having swallowed your irate hungers

Satisfied before bread-breaking

To your dissolution

We splinter into Wholes

Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow

Among the refuse of your unborn centuries

In our busy ashbins

Stink the melodies

Of your

So easily reducible

Adolescences

Our tissue is of that which escapes you

Birth-Breaths and orgasms

The shattering tremor of the static

The far-shore of an instant

The unsurpassable openness of the circle

Legerdemain of God

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums

Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves

Break on our edgeless contours

The mouthed echoes of what

Has exuded to our companionship

Is horrible to the ear

Of the half that is left inside them.

Mexican Desert

The belching ghost-wail of the locomotive

trailing her rattling wooden tail

into the jazz-band sunset.   .   .   .

The mountains in a row

set pinnacles of ferocious isolation

under the alien hot heaven

Vegetable cripples of drought

thrust up the parching appeal

cracking open the earth

stump-fingered cacti

and hunch-back palm trees

belabour the cinders of twilight.   .   .   .

Perlun

          the whipper snapper child of the sun

His pert blonde spirit

          scoured by the Scandinavian Boreas

His head

       an adolescent oval

       ostrich egg

The victorious        silly         beauty of his face

       awakens to his instincts

A vivacious knick-knack tipped with gold

       he puts the world

       to the test of intuition

       Smiling from ear to ear

       Living from other hands to mouth

       Holding in immaculate arms

                           the syphilitic sailor

                           on his avoided death bunk

                           or the movie vamp

       among the muffled shadows of the shrubberies——

       Picking lemons in Los Angeles             broke

The education of “Prince Fils à Papa”