Part 1

ADVICE

_NEW POETRY_

_FALL, 1920_

OCTOBER _By Robert Bridges_

THE FORERUNNER _By Kahlil Gibran_

WORDSWORTH: AN ANTHOLOGY _By R. Cobden-Sanderson_

ADVICE _By Maxwell Bodenheim_

ADVICE

A BOOK OF POEMS

By MAXWELL BODENHEIM

NEW YORK ALFRED·A·KNOPF 1920

COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

TO MINNA WHOSE SMILE IS MY THRONE

Some of the poems which compose this book have appeared in the _Yale Review_, the _Smart Set_, the _New Republic_, _Reedy’s Mirror_, the _Dial_, the _Touchstone_, the _Little Review_, _Poetry: A Magazine of Verse_, the _Century_, and the _New York Tribune_. They are good, in spite of their numerous appearances.

CONTENTS

ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT 13

ADVICE TO A BUTTER-CUP 14

ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAMBOAT 15

FOUNDRY WORKERS 16

ADVICE TO A HORNÈD TOAD 18

ADVICE TO A FOREST 19

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE I 21

ADVICE TO A BLUEBIRD 23

TO A FRIEND 24

ADVICE TO A WOMAN 25

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE II 26

ADVICE TO A BUTTERFLY 28

ADVICE TO A POOL 29

WHEN FOOLS DISPUTE 30

ADVICE TO A GRASS-BLADE 31

EAST-SIDE: NEW YORK 32

TO A MAN 33

THE CHILD MEDITATES 34

PIERROT OBJECTS 36

COLUMBINE REFLECTS 37

RATTLE SNAKE MOUNTAIN DIALOGUE 38

DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PAST AND PRESENT POET 41

SMILES 43

THE COURTESAN CHATS 45

THE MOUNTEBANK CRITICIZES 47

TO LI T’AI PO 49

INSANITY 51

TRACK-WORKERS 53

FIGURE 55

NEGROES 56

BROADWAY 58

FIFTH AVENUE 60

YOUNG WOMAN 62

TWO WOMEN ON A STREET 64

ADVICE TO MAPLE TREES 66

BOARDING HOUSE EPISODE 67

VAUDEVILLE MOMENT 70

TO ORRICK JOHNS 72

YOUNG POET 73

STEEL MILLS: SOUTH CHICAGO 74

SOUTH STATE STREET: CHICAGO 81

ADVICE

ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT

Lacerated grey has bitten Into your shapeless humility. Little episodes of roving Strew their hieroglyphics on your muteness. Life has given you heavy stains Like an ointment growing stale. Endless feet tap over you With a maniac insistence.

O unresisting street-pavement, Keep your passive insolence At the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet. Only one who lies upon his back Can disregard the stars.

ADVICE TO A BUTTER-CUP

Undistinguished butter-cup Lost among myriads of others, To the red ant eyeing you You are giant stillness. He pauses on the boulder of a clod, Baffled by your nearness to the sky. But to the black loam at your feet You are the atom of a pent-up dream.

Undistinguished butter-cup, Take your little breath of contemplation, Undisturbed by haughty tricks of space.

ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAM-BOAT

The brass band plays upon your decks, Like a sturdy harlot aping mirth, And people in starched shields Stuff their passions with sweet words, Life is swishing in the air, Like a tipsy, unseen bridegroom.

O humbly grunting river boat, Take the churning water and the sun Like one who plays with his own chains And flings their turmoil to the sky. Only a voice can leap above high walls.

FOUNDRY WORKERS

Brown faces twisted back Into an ecstasy of tight resistance; Eyes that are huge sweat drops Unheeded by the struggle underneath them-- Throughout the night you stagger under walls Where life is squeezed to squealing bitterness. Beneath your heaving flash of limbs Your thoughts are smashed to a dejected trance And you are swept, like empty mites, Into a glistening frenzy of motion.... Yet, on a Sunday afternoon I have seen you straightening your backs with slow smiles; Walking through the streets And patiently groping for lost outlines. Your lips were placid bruises Almost fearing to relax, And often out upon some green Your legs swung themselves into long lost shapes.

Perhaps upon your death-beds You will lift your hands, with a wraith of grace, Showing life a last, weak curve Of the rhythm he could not kill.

ADVICE TO A HORNÈD TOAD

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown, Rock souls have dwindled to your eyes And thrown a splintered end upon your blood. Night and day have vanished To you, who squat and watch Years loosen one sand grain until Its fall becomes your moment. Tall things plunge over you, Slashing their dreams with motion That holds the death of all they seek, But you, to whom fierce winds are ripples, Do not move lest you lose the taste of stillness.

Hornèd Toad of cloven brown, Never hop from your grey rock crevice Mute with interwoven beginnings and ends. The fluid lies of motion Leave no remembrance behind.

ADVICE TO A FOREST

O trees, to whom the darkness is a child Scampering in and out of your long, green beards; O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim Counting his dreams within your hermitage And slipping down the road, in twilight robes; O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound Reeling with the beat of your caught feet, Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred, When little men come to fell you. These men will saw you into strips Of pointed brooding, blind with paint, But underneath you men will chase The grey staccato of their lives Down a glaring maze of walls Much harder than your own. And when, at last, the deep brown gaze Of stolidly amorous time steals over you, The little men who bit into your hearts Will stray off in a patter of rabbits’ feet. Look down upon these children then With the aloof and weary tolerance That all still things possess, O trees, to whom the darkness was a child Scampering in and out of your long, green beards.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE I

Rounded to a wide eyed clownishness Crowned by the shifting bravado Of his long, brown ears, The rabbit peeked at the sky. To him, the sky seemed an angelic Pasture stripped to phantom tranquility, Where one could nibble thoughtfully. He longed to leave his mild furtiveness And speak to a boldness puzzled by his flesh. With one long circle of despairing grace He flashed into the air, Leaping toward his heaven. But down he crashed against a snake Who ate him with a meditative interest. From that day on the snake was filled With little, meek whispers of concern. The crushed and peaceful rabbit’s dream Cast a groping hush upon his blood. He curled inertly on a rock, In cryptic, wilted savageness. In the end, his dry, grey body Was scattered out upon the rock, Like a story that could not be told.

ADVICE TO A BLUE-BIRD

Who can make a delicate adventure Of walking on the ground? Who can make grass-blades Arcades for pertly careless straying? You alone, who skim against these leaves, Turning all desire into light whips Moulded by your deep blue wing-tips, You who shrill your unconcern Into the sternly antique sky. You to whom all things Hold an equal kiss of touch.

Mincing, wanton blue-bird, Grimace at the hoofs of passing men. You alone can lose yourself Within a sky, and rob it of its blue!

TO A FRIEND

Your head is steel cut into drooping lines That make a mask satirically meek: Your face is like a tired devil weak From drinking many vague and unsought wines. The sullen skepticism of your eyes For ever trying to transcend itself, Is often entered by a wistful elf Who sits naïvely unperturbed and wise.

And this same remnant, with its youthful wiles Held curiously apart from blasphemies, Twirls starlight shivers out upon your sneers And changes them to little, startled smiles. And all your insolence drops to its knees Before the half-won grandeur of past years.

ADVICE TO A WOMAN

The sloping lines of your shoulders Speak of Chinese pagodas. They clash with your western face Where child and courtesan Clasp each other in a feigned embrace. Life, to you, is a liquid mirror. You stand with delicate, perpetual amazement, Vainly seeking your reflection.

RATTLESNAKE MOUNTAIN FABLE II

August sauntered down the mountain-side, Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay. The air was like an old priest Disrobing without embarrassment Before the dark and candid gaze of night. But these things brought no pause To the saucily determined squirrel. His eyes were hungrily upturned To where the stars hung--icily clustered nuts Dotting trees of solitude. He saw the stars just over the horizon, And they seemed to grow On trees that he could reach. So he scampered on, from branch to branch, Wondering why the fairy nut-trees Ran away from him. But, looking down, he spied A softly wild cheeked mountain pool, And there a handful of fairy nuts Bit into the indigo cupping them. With a squeal of weary happiness The squirrel plunged into the mountain pool, And as he drowned within its soundless heart The fairy nuts were jigging over him, Like the unheard stirring of a poem.

ADVICE TO A BUTTERFLY

Aimless petal of the wind, Spinning gently weird circles, To the flowers underneath You are a drunken king of motion; To the plunging winds above You are momentary indecision.

Aimless petal of the wind, Waver carelessly against this June. The universe, like you, is but The drowsy arm of stillness Spinning gently weird circles in his sleep.

ADVICE TO A POOL

Be a liquid threshold for the dawn And let night touch you with his back. The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds

Are only pause and rhythm Within an endless fantasy, But you, like they, can be A dream from the loins of a dream, And build a golden stairway of escape.

O coolly unperturbed pool, Slap your ripples in laughter at men, Who splash you with their lordly hands. Time is but a phantom dagger That motion lifts to slay itself.

WHEN FOOLS DISPUTE

A trickle of dawn insinuated itself Through the crevices of black satiation. The elderly trees coughed, lightly, hurriedly, In remonstrance against the invasion. Lean with a virginal poison, The grass-blades shook, immune to light and time. A bird lost in a tree Shrilly flirted with its energy.... One fool, in the garden, spoke to another.

ADVICE TO A GRASS-BLADE

Thin and dark green symbol Of an earth forever raising Myriads of chained wings, Breezes have a form, to you, And sounds break into vivid shape. The proud finality of tiny sight Cannot lure your pliant blindness.

Thin and dark green blade, Be not awed by trees and men Whose sound is all that gives them life. You reach the sky because your face Is not turned toward it.

EAST-SIDE: NEW YORK

An old Jew munches an apple, With conquering immersion All the thwarted longings of his life Urge on his determined teeth. His face is hard and pear-shaped; His eyes are muddy capitulations; But his mouth is incongruous. Softly, slightly distended, Like that of a whistling girl, It is ingenuously haunting And makes the rest of him a soiled, grey background. Hopes that lie within their grave Of submissive sternness, Have spilled their troubled ghosts upon this mouth, And a tortured belief Has dwindled into tenderness upon it.... He trudges off behind his push-cart And the Ghetto walks away with him.

TO A MAN

Master of earnest equilibrium, You are a Christ made delicate By centuries of baffled meditation. You curve an old myth to a peaceful sword, Like some sleep-walker challenging The dream that gave him shape. With gentle, antique insistence You place your child’s hand on the universe And trace a smile of love within its depths. And yet, the whirling scarecrow men have made Of something that eludes their sight, May have the startling simplicity of your smile.

Once every thousand years Stillness fades into a shape That men may crucify.

THE CHILD MEDITATES

The oak-tree in front of my house Smells different every morning. Sometimes it smells fresh and wise Like my mother’s hair. Sometimes it stands ashamed Because it doesn’t own the smell It borrowed from our flower-garden. Sometimes it has a windy smell, As though it had come back from a long walk. The oak-tree in front of my house Has different smells, like grown up people.

My doll hides behind her pink cheeks, So that you can’t see when she moves, But it doesn’t matter because She always moves when no one is looking, And that is why people think she is still. People laugh when I say that my doll is alive, But if she were dead, my fingers Wouldn’t know that they were touching her. She lives inside a little house. And laughs because I cannot find the door.

The colours in my room Meet each other and hesitate. Is that what people call shape? Nobody seems to think so, But I believe that lines are dead shapes Unless they fall against each other And look surprised, like the colours in my room!

PIERROT OBJECTS

They have made me an airy apology For the crude insistence of their flesh! They have made me twist my tongue Into fickle nonchalance! With a languid impudence I have tarried underneath the moon, While the haggard reticence Of their lives forgot itself within me! Well, I am rebelling At the men who make me Their grimacing marionnette! Let them find another dancing-teacher For their dull, unruffled fears. I am off to tear my black and white Into shreds, within a valley Where nakedness and colours do not need An artificial night to make them brave!

COLUMBINE REFLECTS

They have moulded my face with a tear and a sneer. They have sandalled me with caprice, And the heart they have given me Is a bag of red tissue-paper. Their loves are ragged and fat And seek the consolation Of a tinkling effigy! But even an effigy may wink An eye at its slinking masters! I can laugh at their frantic, tattered arms Spinning me into impish posturings, And jeer at the faces behind me! After my play I go to sleep, But they must sit, heavily looking at each other.

RATTLE-SNAKE MOUNTAIN DIALOGUE

RATTLE-SNAKE MOUNTAIN Every night the sky grips my shoulder, in pain. The cows upon my slope Attack their blades of grass with less decision. The boulders reaching in to form my ribs, Are touched by evening dizziness, to dust, And lose their fierce pretence of hardness. Three crows in a row Search for clearer tongues, with steady discords.

MAN The nervous dissolution Which men call beauty stands Sternly watching itself.

RATTLE-SNAKE MOUNTAIN Evening, staggering under dead men’s tongues, Makes light of my loneliness. He comes like a madman dissolved Into unbearable quietness. But, drinking my vigorous muteness, He melts into that stream of seeking motion Which men call morning.

MAN You teach him to make his recompense A solitary unfolding Walking perilously Between the scowls of life and death.

RATTLE-SNAKE MOUNTAIN When he goes he is something more than himself. He holds a lean alertness That, green as any leaf, Takes the flutterings of life, unperturbed.

MAN Beauty is a proud stare Challenging all things to remove Their inattentive clamours: And some things bow abruptly, Timidly stroking their untouched skins.

RATTLE-SNAKE MOUNTAIN And thus evening bows into morning.

DIALOGUE BETWEEN A PAST AND PRESENT POET

PAST POET I wrote of roses on a woman’s breast, Glowing as though her blood Had welled out to a spellbound fierceness; And the glad, light mixture of her hair. I wrote of God and angels. They stole the simple blush of my desire To make their isolated triumph human. Knights and kings flooded my song, Catching with their glittering clash The unheard boldness in my life. Gods and nymphs slipped through my voice, And with the lofty scurrying of their feet Spurned the smirched angers of my days.

PRESENT POET You raised an unhurried, church-like escape. You lingered in shimmering idleness; Or lengthened a prayer into a lance; Or strengthened a thought till it heaved off all of life And dropped its sightless heaven into your smile. Life, to us, is a colourless tangle. Like madly gorgeous weavers Our eyes reiterate themselves on life.

PAST POET My towering simplicity Loosening an evening of belief Over the things it dared not view, Gladly shunned reality Just as your mad weaver does.

PRESENT POET Reality is a formless lure, And only when we know this Do we dare to be unreal.

SMILES

Smiles are the words beyond the words That thoughts abandon helplessly. Upon this nervous shop-girl’s face, Where clusters of tiny limpness meet, A frightened spark leaps high and drops Into the hot pause of a banished love. A lustrelessly plump Girl beside her does not know That her face for moments glows Into a helpless solitude. Upon an old man’s face Are gleams of meek embarrassment-- The faded presence of some old debt? This woman’s face is scorched By a torch that falls from weary hands And makes her laugh an unheard lie. The face of this tamed sprite Shimmers with an understanding Of the opaque loss she cannot bear, And I see that smiles are sometimes Words beyond the words That thoughts abandon hopefully.

THE COURTESAN CHATS

Last night I met a passive man With almost no curve to his face, And skin relentlessly white. He made me tell his fortune With a pack of cards. “Jack of hearts--your love will be A scullion overturning trays of food And standing dubiously in their midst.” “Queen of diamonds--you will have a wife Like a thistle dipped in frost, Helpless in your sheathed hands.” “Deuce of clubs--a downcast jester Will pester you with slanting malice When you seek to play the king.” “Ace of hearts--your life will stand Straight in a desperate majesty, Its lurid robes ever slipping And one wound endlessly dripping.” The passive man blew out a candle On the table and bade me leave, Not desiring me to see his face.

THE MOUNTEBANK CRITICIZES

I lose all sense of profiles, Strolling through your greys and blacks and browns! No man bestows his orange robe Soberly upon your uncoloured pavements, Rebuking life for being death. No woman taunts her sorrows With a coloured haughtiness. When you take to colours, you are ashamed, Like pages nibbling at a pilfered tart. You go back quickly to your coldness. And since you have no colours on your clothes, You walk in straight and measured lilts As befits the seriously blind. Your women do not stroll as though Each step were a timid intrigue Woven into the climax to which they fare. Pistols, rhapsodies and heavy odours Drugged the lustre of my time. Yet, we had a virtue. We lavished colours on our backs And ravished our sorrow with brightness That often gave a lightness to our feet!

TO LI T’AI PO

They are writing poems to you: White devils who have not Smeared the distant yellow of your life Upon their skins. Faces where snob and harlequin Ogle each other in two, cold colours, White and red; Faces where middle age Sits, tearing a last gardenia; Faces continually cracked By the brittle larceny of age; Faces where emotions Stand disarmed within a calm mirage: These faces bend over paper And steal from you a little silver and red So that their lives may seem to bleed Under the prick of a flashing need. The old and tired smile Of one who spies too much within himself To spare the effort of a halting frown, Brushed its sceptre over your face. You gave kind eyes to your hope, Desiring it to grope unfearing Underneath the toppling mountain-tops. The wine you drank was a lake In which you splashed and found a vigour; The wine you drank was void of taste. Your yellow skin resembled A balanced docility Smiling at all things--even at itself-- Li T’ai Po.

INSANITY

Like a vivid hyperbole, The sun plunged into April’s freshness, And struck its sparkling madness Against the barnlike dejection Of this dark red insane asylum. A softly clutching noise Stumbled from the open windows. Now and then obliquely reeling shrieks Rose, as though from men To whom death had assumed An inexpressibly kindly face. A man stood at one window, His gaunt face trembling underneath A feverish jauntiness. A long white feather slanted back Upon his almost shapeless hat, Like an innocent evasion. Hotly incessant, his voice Methodically flogged the April air: A voice that held the clashing bones Of happiness and fear; A voice in which emotion Sharply ridiculed itself; A monstrously vigorous voice Mockingly tearing at life With an unanswerable question.

Hollowed out by his howl, I turned and saw an asylum guard. His petulantly flabby face Rolled into deathlike chips of eyes. He bore the aimless confidence Of one contentedly playing with other men’s wings. He walked away; the man above still shrieked. I could not separate them.

TRACK-WORKERS

The rails you carry cut into your hands, Like the sharp lips of an unsought lover. As you stumble over the ties Sunlight is clinging, yellow spit Raining down upon your faces. You are the living cuspidors of day. Dirt, its teasing ghost, dust, And passionless kicks of steel, fill you. Flowers sprouting near the tracks, Brush their lightly odoured hands In vain against your stale jackets of sweat. Within you, minds and hearts Are snoring to the curt rhythm of your breath. You do not see this blustering blackbird Promenading on a barbed-wire fence. He eyes you with spritelike hauteur, Unable to understand Why your motions endlessly copy each other, One of you, a meek and burly Pole, Peers a moment at the strutting blackbird With a fleeting shade of dull resentment.... There is always one among you Who recoils from glimpsing corpses.

FIGURE

Through the turbulent servility Of a churlish city street He strides opaquely; nothing in his walk Resembles an advancing gleam. His legs are muffled iron Stubbornly following even thoughts, His gaily pugnacious head Seems worried because no dread Remains for it to slay. His eyes hold an austerity That recalls itself while leaping, And often melts into amusement. The bent poise of his body Tells of walls that threw him back, Only to crumble underneath The stunned friendliness of his face. Through the angularly churlish street He walks, and stoops beneath the captured weight Of eyes that do not see him.

NEGROES