The Sardonic Arm. Maxwell Bodenheim
By another nightmare dream.
If men could see this they might kneel
Upon this sidewalk and observe
The importance of apple-peelings
Testing their spirals of red
Against the thick, brown stream.
THE INCURABLE MYSTIC ANSWERS WESTERN AMBITIONS
Western men,
Your life is a minor rhapsody
For flute and violin.
With sounds, now shrill, now suave,
You steal your hymns and frolics
From the surface dirt of realism
And the curves of sensuality.
Your feeble mysticism
Strains at the task of lifting tables
And placing naïve retorts
Into the mouths of spirits.
Your erudition is the vain
Gesture of your repentance
Grown over-thin and complex.
Western men, you are beggars
Devouring bits of guile
Tossed from a violent mirage.
The contours of a rose
Bribing the quiet madness of evening
With cunning promises of red,
Are more important than your sweating love
And the rushing dreads of your market-places.
The contours of a rose
Will still arrange their subtle dream
When your clever schemes of mud
Win the drifting pension of dust.
Your charts and diagrams
Are merely a ragamuffin’s initials
Cut into an ancient gateway
That guards the invisible meaning of life.
PLATONIC NARRATIVE
Tomato soup at four A. M.
We seemed to sit upon the floor
But, with a feathery discretion,
We advised our bodies
To make the floor a glistening fundamental
Flattened by the walk of centuries.
Continuing the advice,
We told our bodies to arrange
A variation on the floor
And give the floor a living
Reason for existence.
Our bodies, with clandestine movements,
Accepted the advice
And became the essences of Plato,
Almost tempting our flesh
To renounce its weight.
Our lifted knees were actors
Simulating treason to our souls,
With their prominence of bone.
They were interviewed
By elbows that held a light disbelief.
Our backs against the cushions
Had disappeared, and we did not move
For fear that all of us
Might rush away through the openings.
Our heads were fiercely bent down,
As though they felt an ecstasy
Of shame at their crudity …
When we returned to the tomato soup
It was an insipid fluid,
But we drank it indifferently,
And it is also possible
That an unearthly laugh
Peered through the crevices of our eyes,
Finding no need for sound.
PORTRAITS
I.
Stenographer
Intellect,
You are an electrical conspiracy
Between the advance guards of soul and mind.
Thoughts and spiritual instincts,
Profound and unfanatical,
Sit plotting against the enmity
That seeks to wall them in separate castles …
A thought and a spiritual instinct
Link themselves for an instant
Upon the face of this stenographer.
Unknown to her mind and speech
A gleam of intellect contradicts her features,
And she spies the jest of her relation
To the droning man beside her.
This incredible news
Will be doubted by poets and scientists.
II.
Waitress
Musicians and carpenters
Meet upon your trays of food:
Aesthetics and the flesh
Play their little joke upon dogma,
Urged by the rhythm of your hands.
Your rouged cheeks slip unnoticed
Through the sexless turmoil.
The rituals are hastened
Lest they become self-conscious …
I stop you and remark:
“The sylvan story of your hair
Is damaged by your rhinestone comb.
May I remove it?” Then you stare.
The fact that you have been
Greeted by something other than a wink
Almost causes you to think.
You walk away, holding an emotion
That skims the lips of many adjectives.
Confused, uncertain, scornful—
With none of them fused together.
III.