Against This Age. Maxwell Bodenheim
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Maxwell Bodenheim
Against This Age
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4057664145017
Table of Contents
NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING DELICATE
RHYMED CONVERSATION WITH MONEY
BABY
1
The blue beginning of your eyes
Condenses the sprawling and assured
Blue with which the sky retreats
From those obscene confessions known as days.
2
Again, your battling mites of blue
Try to stop the revolving monster of life
And find the indelible persuasiveness
Of single forms within the circling blur.
Sundered bits of a soul
Astonished at their shrunken estate,
They are not sure that they have still survived,
And plead for the conviction of sight.
3
But when they recollect
The hugely placid manners
Of their life, before the earthly exile
Made them small and fastened
To one pathetic puzzle,
Their blue reverts to swelling reveries
Whose outward circles spurn the curtained jail.
4
Upon your softly incomplete
Face, where germs of devils stir in curves
That tremble into questioning symmetries,
A thrust of darkness sometimes interferes
With secret, virgin places underneath
Your eyes and where your leaf-thin nostrils pause.
This darkness bends with helpless messages,
Like history admonishing a world
Personified in one, composite face.
NIGHTMARE AND SOMETHING DELICATE
You mutter, with your face
Pleading for more room because
It has scanned a panorama:
You mutter, with every difference
On your face an error in size
Mesmerized by the sight of a sky-line:
“Life is a nightmare and something delicate.”
Lady, they have made a world for you,
And if you dare to leave it
They will flagellate you
With the bones of dead men’s thoughts,
And five senses, five termagants
Snapping at the uneasy mind.
“No, five riotous flirts,”
You say, “and each one has
A thick blandishment to master the mind.”
Yes, lady, through the bold disarrangement of words
Life acquires with great foresight
An interesting nervousness.
But