Part 4

They stroll back with tired steps lips still soft with the softness of petals voices faint with the whisper of woods; and they wander through the darkling streets full of stench of bodies and clothes and merchandise full of the hard hum of iron things; and into their cheeks that the wind had burned and the sun that kisses burned out on the rustling meadows into their cheeks soft with lazy caresses comes sultry caged breath of panthers fetid, uneasy fury of love sprouting hot in the dust and stench of walls and clothes and merchandise, pent in the stridence of the twilight streets.

And they look with terror in each other's eyes and part their hot hands stained with grasses and flowerstalks and are afraid of their kisses.

VIII EMBARQUEMENT POUR CYTHERE AFTER WATTEAU

The mists have veiled the far end of the lake this sullen amber afternoon; our island is quite hidden, and the peaks hang wan as clouds above the ruddy haze.

Come, give your hand that lies so limp, a tuberose among brown oak-leaves; put your hand in mine and let us leave this bank where we have lain the day long.

In the boat the naked oarsman stands. Let us walk faster, or do you fear to tear that brocaded dress in apricot and grey? Love, there are silk cushions in the stern maroon and apple-green, crocus-yellow, crimson, amber-grey.

We will lie and listen to the waves slap soft against the prow, and watch the boy slant his brown body to the long oar-stroke.

But, love, we are more beautiful than he. We have forgotten the grey sick yearning nights brushed off the old cobwebs of desire; we stand strong immortal as the slender brown boy who waits to row our boat to the island.

But love how your steps drag.

And what is this bundle of worn brocades I press so passionately to me? Old rags of the past, snippings of Helen's dress, of Melisande's, scarfs of old paramours rotted in the grave ages and ages since.

No lake the ink yawns at me from the writing table.

IX LA RUE DU TEMPS PASSE

Far away where the tall grey houses fade A lamp blooms dully through the dusk, Through the effacing dusk that gently veils The traceried balconies and the wreaths Carved above the shuttered windows Of forgotten houses.

Behind one of the crumbled garden walls A pale woman sits in drooping black And stares with uncomprehending eyes At the thorny angled twigs that bore Years ago in the moon-spun dusk One scarlet rose.

In an old high room where the shadows troop On tiptoe across the creaking boards A shrivelled man covers endless sheets Rounding out in his flourishing hand Sentence after sentence loud With dead kings' names.

Looking out at the vast grey violet dusk A pale boy sits in a window, a book Wide open on his knees, and fears With cold choked fear the thronging lives That lurk in the shadows and fill the dusk With menacing steps.

Far away the gaslamp glows dull gold A vague tulip in the misty night. The clattering drone of a distant tram Grows loud and fades with a hum of wires Leaving the street breathless with silence, chill And the listening houses.

_Bordeaux_

X

_O douce Sainte Geneviève ramène moi a ta ville, Paris._

In the smoke of morning the bridges are dusted with orangy sunshine.

Bending their black smokestacks far back muddling themselves in their spiralling smoke the tugboats pass under the bridges and behind them stately gliding smooth like clouds the barges come black barges with blunt prows spurning the water gently gently rebuffing the opulent wavelets of opal and topaz and sapphire, barges casually come from far towns towards far towns unhurryingly bound.

The tugboats shrieks and shrieks again calling beyond the next bend and away. In the smoke of morning the bridges are dusted with orangy sunshine.

_O douce Sainte Geneviève ramène moi a ta ville, Paris._

Big hairy-hoofed horses are drawing carts loaded with flour-sacks, white flour-sacks, bluish in the ruddy flush of the morning streets.

On one cart two boys perch wrestling and their arms and faces glow ruddy against the white flour-sacks as the sun against the flour-white sky.

_O douce Sainte Geneviève ramène moi a ta ville, Paris._

Under the arcade loud as castanettes with steps of little women hurrying to work an old hag who has a mole on her chin that is tufted with long white hairs sells incense-sticks, and the trail of their strangeness lingers in the many-scented streets among the smells of markets and peaches and the must of old books from the quays and the warmth of early-roasting coffee.

The old hag's incense has smothered the timid scent of wild strawberries and triumphantly mingled with the strong reek from the river of green slime along stonework of docks and the pitch-caulked decks of barges, barges casually come from far towns towards far towns unhurryingly bound.

_O douce Sainte Geneviève ramène moi a ta ville, Paris._

XI A L'OMBRE DES JEUNES FILLES EN FLEURS

And now when I think of you I see you on your piano-stool finger the ineffectual bright keys and even in the pinkish parlor glow your eyes sea-grey are very wide as if they carried the reflection of mocking black pinebranches and unclimbed red-purple mountains mist-tattered under a violet-gleaming evening.

But chirruping of marriageable girls voices of eager, wise virgins, no lamp unlit every wick well trimmed, fill the pinkish parlor chairs, bobbing hats and shrill tinkling teacups in circle after circle about you so that I can no longer see your eyes.

Shall I tear down the pinkish curtains smash the imitation ivory keyboard that you may pluck with bare fingers on the strings?

I sit cramped in my chair. Futility tumbles everlastingly like great flabby snowflakes about me.

Were they in your eyes, or mine the tattered mists about the mountains and the pitiless grey sea?

_1919_

ON FOREIGN TRAVEL

I

Grey riverbanks in the dusk Melting away into mist A hard breeze sharp off the sea The ship's screws lunge and throb And the voices of sailors singing.

O I have come wandering Out of the dust of many lands Ears by all tongues jangled Feet worn by all arduous ways-- O the voices of sailors singing.

What nostalgia of sea And free new-scented spaces dreams of towns vermillion-gated Must be in their blood as in mine That the sailors long so in singing.

Churned water marbled astern Grey riverbanks in the dusk Melting away into mist And a shrill wind hard off the sea. O the voices of sailors singing.

II

Padding lunge of a camel's stride turning the sharp purple flints. A man sings:

Breast deep in the dawn a queen of the east; the woolen folds of her robe hang white and straight as the hard marble columns of the temple of Jove.

A thousand days the pebbles have scuttled under the great pads of my camels.

A thousands days like bite of sour apples have been bitter with desire in my mouth.

A thousand days of cramped legs flecked with green slobber of dromedaries.

At the crest of the road that transfixes the sun she awaits me lean with desire with muscles tightened by these thousand days pallid with dust sinewy naked before her.

Padding lunge of a camel's stride over the flint-strewn hills. A man sings:

I have heard men sing songs of how in scarlet pools in the west in purpurate mist that bursts from the sun trodden like a grape under the feet of darkness a woman with great breasts thighs white like wintry mountains bathes her nakedness.

I have lain biting my cheeks many nights with ears murmurous with the songs of these strange men. My arms have stung as if burned by the touch of red ants with anguish to circle strokingly her bulging smooth body. My blood has soured to gall. The ten toes of my feet are hard as buzzards' claws from the stones of roads, from clambering cold rockfaces of hills. For uncountable days' journeys jouncing on the humps of camels iron horizons have swayed like the rail of a ship at sea mountains have tossed like wine shaken hard in a wine cup.

I have heard men sing songs of the scarlet pools of the sunset.

Two men, bundled pyramids of brown abreast, bow to the long slouch of their slowstriding camels. Shrilly the yellow man sings:

In the courts of Han green fowls with carmine tails peck at the yellow grain court ladies scatter with tiny ivory hands, the tails of the fowls droop with multiple elegance over the wan blue stones as the hands of courtladies droop on the goldstiffened silk of their angular flower-embroidered dresses.

In the courts of Han little hairy dogs are taught to bark twice at the mention of the name of Confucius.

The twittering of the women that hop like silly birds through the courts of Han became sharp like little pins in my ears, their hands in my hands rigid like small ivory scoops to scoop up mustard with when I had heard the songs of the western pools where the great queen is throned on a purple throne in whose vast encompassing arms all bitter twigs of desire burst into scarlet bloom.

Padding lunge of the camel's stride over flint-strewn hills. The brown man sings:

On the house-encumbered hills of great marble Rome no man has ever counted the columns no man has ever counted the statues no man has ever counted the laws sharply inscribed in plain writing on tablets of green bronze.

At brightly lit tables in a great brick basilica seven hundred literate slaves copy on rolls of thin parchment adorned by seals and purple bows the taut philosophical epigrams announced by the emperor each morning while taking his bath.

A day of rain and roaring gutters the wine-reeking words of a drunken man who clenched about me hard-muscled arms and whispered with moist lips against my ear filled me with smell and taste of spices with harsh panting need to seek out the great calm implacable queen of the east who erect against sunrise holds in the folds of her woolen robe all knowledge of delight against whose hard white flesh my flesh will sear to cinders in a last sheer flame.

Among the house-encumbered hills of great marble Rome I could no longer read the laws inscribed on tablets of green bronze. The maxims of the emperor's philosophy were croaking of toads in my ears. A day of rain and roaring gutters the wine-reeking words of a drunken man: ... breast deep in the dawn a queen of the east.

The camels growl and stretch out their necks, their slack lips jiggle as they trot towards a water hole in a pebbly torrent bed.

The riders pile dry twigs for a fire and gird up their long gowns to warm at the flame their lean galled legs.

Says the yellow man:

You have seen her in the west?

Says the brown man:

Hills and valleys stony roads. In the towns the bright eyes of women looking out from lattices. Camps in the desert where men passed the time of day where were embers of fires and greenish piles of camel-dung.

You have seen her in the east?

Says the yellow man:

Only red mountains and bare plains, the blue smoke of villages at evening, brown girls bathing along banks of streams.

I have slept with no woman only my dream.

Says the brown man:

I have looked in no woman's eyes only stared along eastward roads.

They eat out of copper bowls beside the fire in silence. They loose the hobbles from the knees of their camels and shout as they jerk to their feet. The yellow man rides west. The brown man rides east.

Their songs trail among the split rocks of the desert.

Sings the yellow man:

I have heard men sing songs of how in the scarlet pools that spurt from the sun trodden like a grape under the feet of darkness a woman with great breasts bathes her nakedness.

Sings the brown man:

After a thousand days of cramped legs flecked with green slobber of dromedaries she awaits me lean with desire pallid with dust sinewy naked before her.

Their songs fade in the empty desert.

III

There was a king in China.

He sat in a garden under a moon of gold while a black slave scratched his back with a back-scratcher of emerald. Beyond the tulip bed where the tulips were stiff goblets of fiery wine stood the poets in a row.

One sang the intricate patterns of snowflakes One sang the henna-tipped breasts of girls dancing and of yellow limbs rubbed with attar. One sang red bows of Tartar horsemen and whine of arrows and blood-clots on new spearshafts The others sang of wine and dragons coiled in purple bowls, and one, in a droning voice recited the maxims of Lao Tse.

(Far off at the walls of the city groaning of drums and a clank of massed spearmen. Gongs in the temples.)

The king sat under a moon of gold while a black slave scratched his back with a back-scratcher of emerald. The long gold nails of his left hand twined about a red tulip blotched with black, a tulip shaped like a dragon's mouth or the flames bellying about a pagoda of sandalwood. The long gold nails of his right hand were held together at the tips in an attitude of discernment: to award the tulip to the poet of the poets that stood in a row.

(Gongs in the temples. Men with hairy arms climbing on the walls of the city. They have red bows slung on their backs; their hands grip new spearshafts.)

The guard of the tomb of the king's great grandfather stood with two swords under the moon of gold. With one sword he very carefully slit the base of his large belly and inserted the other and fell upon it and sprawled beside the king's footstool. His blood sprinkled the tulips and the poets in a row.

(The gongs are quiet in the temples. Men with hairy arms scattering with taut bows through the city; there is blood on new spearshafts.)

The long gold nails of the king's right hand were held together at the tips in an attitude of discernment. The geometrical glitter of snowflakes, the pointed breasts of yellow girls crimson with henna, the swirl of river-eddies about a barge where men sit drinking, the eternal dragon of magnificence.... Beyond the tulip bed stood the poets in a row.

The garden full of spearshafts and shouting and the whine of arrows and the red bows of Tartars and trampling of the sharp hoofs of war-horses. Under the golden moon the men with hairy arms struck off the heads of the tulips in the tulip-bed and of the poets in a row.

The king lifted the hand that held the flaming dragon-flower.

Him of the snowflakes, he said. On a new white spearshaft the men with hairy arms spitted the king and the black slave who scratched his back with a back-scratcher of emerald.

There was a king in China.

IV

Says the man from Weehawken to the man from Sioux City as they jolt cheek by jowl on the bus up Broadway: --That's her name, Olive Thomas, on the red skysign, died of coke or somethin' way over there in Paris. Too much money. Awful immoral the lives them film stars lead.

The eye of the man from Sioux City glints in the eye of the man from Weehawken. Awful ... lives out of sky-signs and lust; curtains of pink silk fluffy troubling the skin rooms all prinkly with chandeliers, bed cream-color with pink silk tassles creased by the slender press of thighs. Her eyebrows are black her lips rubbed scarlet breasts firm as peaches gold curls gold against her cheeks. She dead all of her dead way over there in Paris.

O golden Aphrodite.

The eye of the man from Weehawken slants away from the eye of the man from Sioux City. They stare at the unquiet gold dripping sky-signs.

PHASES OF THE MOON

I

Again they are plowing the field by the river; in the air exultant a smell of wild garlic crushed out by the shining steel in the furrow that opens softly behind the heavy-paced horses, dark moist noisy with fluttering of sparrows; and their chirping and the clink of the harness chimes like bells; and the plowman walks at one side with sliding steps, his body thrown back from the waist. O the sudden sideways lift of his back and his arms as he swings the plow from the furrow.

And behind the river sheening blue and the white beach and the sails of schooners, and hoarsely laughing the black crows wheel and glint. Ha! Haha!

Other springs you answered their laughing and shouted at them across the fallow lands that smelt of wild garlic and pinewoods and earth.

This year the crows flap cawing overhead Ha! Haha! and the plow-harness clinks and the pines echo the moaning shore.

No one laughs back at the laughing crows. No one shouts from the edge of the new-plowed field.

_Sandy Point_

II

The full moon soars above the misty street filling the air with a shimmer of silver. Roofs and chimney-pots cut silhouettes of dark against the milk-washed sky! O moon fast waning!

Seems only a night ago you hung a shallow cup of topaz-colored glass that tilted towards my feverish dry lips brimful of promise in the flaming west: O moon fast waning!

And each night fuller and colder, moon, the silver has welled up within you; still I I have not drunk, only the salt tide of parching desires has welled up within me: only you have attained, waning moon.

The moon soars white above the stony street, wan with fulfilment. O will the tide of yearning ebb with the moon's ebb leaving me cool darkness and peace with the moon's waning?

_Madrid_

III

The shrill wind scatters the bloom of the almond trees but under the bark of the shivering poplars the sap rises and on the dark twigs of the planes buds swell.

Out in the country along soggy banks of ditches among busy sprouting grass there are dandelions. Under the asphalt under the clamorous paving-stones the earth heaves and stirs and all the blind live things expand and writhe.

Only the dead lie still in their graves, stiff, heiratic, only the changeless dead lie without stirring.

Spring is not a good time for the dead.

_Battery Park_

IV

Buildings shoot rigid perpendiculars latticed with window-gaps into the slate sky.

Where the wind comes from the ice crumbles about the edges of green pools; from the leaping of white thighs comes a smooth and fleshly sound, girls grip hands and dance grey moss grows green under the beat of feet of saffron crocus-stained.

Where the wind comes from purple windflowers sway on the swelling verges of pools, naked girls grab hands and whirl fling heads back stamp crimson feet.

Buildings shoot rigid perpendiculars latticed with window-gaps into the slate sky.

Garment-workers loaf in their overcoats (stare at the gay breasts of pigeons that strut and peck in the gutters). Their fingers are bruised tugging needles through fuzzy hot layers of cloth, thumbs roughened twirling waxed thread; they smell of lunchrooms and burnt cloth. The wind goes among them detaching sweat-smells from underclothes making muscles itch under overcoats tweaking legs with inklings of dancetime.

Bums on park-benches spit and look up at the sky.

Garment-workers in their overcoats pile back into black gaps of doors.

Where the wind comes from scarlet windflowers sway on rippling verges of pools, sound of girls dancing thud of vermillion feet.

_Madison Square_

V

The stars bend down through the dingy platitude of arc-lights as if they were groping for something among the houses, as if they would touch the gritty pavement covered with dust and scraps of paper and piles of horse-dung of the wide deserted square.

They are all about me; they sear my body. How very cold the stars are touching my body. What do they seek the fierce ice-flames of the stars in the platitude of arc-lights?

_Plaza Mayor, Madrid_

VI

Not willingly have I wronged you O Eros, it is the bitter blood of joyless generations making my fingers loosen suddenly about the full glass of purple wine for which my dry lips ache, making me turn aside from the wide arms of lovers that would have slaked the rage of my body for supple arms and burning young flushed faces to wander in solitary streets.

A funeral clatters over the glimmering cobbles; they are burying despair! Lank horses whose raw bones show through the embroidered black caparisons and whose heads jerk feebly under the tall nodding crests; they are burying despair. A great hearse that trundles crazily along under pompous swaying plumes and intricate designs of mud-splashed heraldry; they are burying despair! A coffin obliterated under the huge folds of a faded velvet pall and following clattering over the cobblestones lurching through mud-puddles a long train of cabs rain-soaked barouches old landaus off which the paint has peeled leprous coupés; in their blank windows shines the glint of interminable gaslamps; they are burying despair!

Joyously I turn into the wineshop where with strumming of tambourines and staccato cackle of castanets they are welcoming the new year, and I look in the eyes of the woman; (are they your wide eyes O Eros?) who sits with wine-dabbled lips and stained tinsel dress torn open by the brown hands of strong young lovers; (were they your brown hands O Eros?).

--Your flesh is hot to my cold hands hot to thaw the ice of an old curse now that with pomp of plumes and strings of ceremonial cabs they are burying despair.

She laughs and points with a skinny forefinger at the flabby yellow breasts that hang over the tarnished tinsel of her dress, and shows me her brown wolf's teeth; and the blood in my temples goes suddenly cold with bitterness and I know it was not despair that they buried.

_New Year's Day--Casa de Bottin_

VII