Part 3

Words are soldiers of fortune Hired by different ideas To provide an importance for life But within the glens of silence They meet in secret peace.... Undertaker, do you make of death A puffing wretch forever pursued By duplicates of vanquished forms? Or do you make him a sneering King Brushing flies from his bloodless cheeks? Do you see him as an unappeased brooding Walking over the dust of men? Do you make him an eager giant Discovering and blending into his consciousness The tiny parts of his limitless mind?

_Undertaker_

Death and I do not know each other. I am the stolid janitor Who cleans the litter he has left And claims a fancied payment.

_Poet_

Come to my fantastic forest And you will not need to rise From simple labours, asking death For final wages.

EMOTIONAL MONOLOGUE

_A man is sitting within the enigmatic turmoil of a railroad station. His face is narrow and young, and his nose, lips, and eyes carved to a Semitic sharpness, have been sundered by a bloodless catastrophe. A traveling-bag stands at his feet. Around him people are clutching farewells and shouting greetings. Within him a monologue addresses an empty theatre._

I am strangling emotions And casting them into the seats Of an empty theatre. When my lifeless audience is complete, The ghosts of former emotions Will entertain their dead masters. After each short act A humorous ghost will fly through the audience, Striking the limp hands into applause, And between the acts Sepulchral indifference will mingle With the dust upon the backs of seats. Upon the stage a melodrama And a travesty will romp Against a back-drop of fugitive resignation. Climax and anti-climax Will jilt each other and drift Into a cheated insincerity. Sometimes the lights will retire While a shriek and laugh Make a martyr of the darkness. When the lights reappear An actor-ghost will assure the audience That nothing has happened save The efforts of a fellow ghost To capture life again. In his role of usher Another ghost will arrange The lifeless limbs of the audience Into postures of relief. Sometimes a comedy will trip The feet of an assassin, Declaring that if ghosts were forced To undergo a second death Their thinness might become unbearable. At other times indignant tragedy Will banish an intruding farce, Claiming that life should not retain The luxury of another laugh. The first act of the play will show The owner of the theatre Conversing with the ghost of a woman. As unresponsive as stone Solidly repelling a spectral world, His words will keenly betray The bloodless control of his features. He will say: “With slightly lowered shoulders, Because of a knife sticking in my back, I shall trifle with crowded highways, Buying decorations For an interrupted bridal-party. This process will be unimportant To the workshop of my mind Where love and death are only Colourless problems upon a chart.” The ghost of the woman will say: “Your mind is but the rebellious servant Of sensitive emotions And brings them clearer dominance.” And what shall I mournfully answer? I am strangling emotions And casting them into the seats Of an empty theatre.

PRONOUNCED FANTASY

A negro girl with skin As black as a psychic threat, And plentiful swells of blonde hair, Sat at a badly tuned piano And vanquished her fingers upon the keys. A midnight exultation Fastened itself on her face, Quivering over the shrouded prominence Of her lips and nose. Her dress was pink and short, And hung upon her tall, thin body, Like a lesson in buffoonery. She lectured her heart on the piano With violence of minor chords. Her voice was a prisoner Whose strong hands turned the bars of his cell Into musical strings. _Wen’ tuh Houston, tuh get mah trunk, Did’n get mah trunk, but ah got dam’ drunk. Well, ahm satisfi-i-ied Cause ah gotta be-e-e-ee._ The negro girl turned and cursed With religious incision At a parrot in a white spittoon. He pampered his derision While she played another tune. Then he saw her long blonde hair And paused in the midst of his squawk.

II

I found the negro girl Walking down a railroad track. The unconscious humour of sunlight Disputed the gloom of her skin. Her gray and dirty clothes Disgraced the haste of her body. Her feet and arms were bare And thin as sensual disappointments. An egg stood straight upon The blonde attention of her hair. The upturned remonstrance of her head Revealed her balancing effort. Lacking a more intense food She dined upon the air And sang with loosened despair.

_Gonna lay mah head right down upon dat-- Down upon dat railroad track! Gonna rest mah head right down upon dat railroad track. An’ wen the train goes by--’m boy-- Ahm gonna snatch it back._

The negro girl received my gaze And broke it on her poignant face. “Why do you carry the egg?” I said. “If I could only hate it less I might break it, and undress,” She answered with motionless lips.

WHEN SPIRITS SPEAK OF LIFE

_Three spirits sit upon a low stone wall placed on the top of a hill. Their figures are gray, with human outlines, and their faces are those of a boy, a woman, and an old man. Light is greeting intimations of evening. The wall, the hill, and the figures exist only to the spirits who have created them._

_First Spirit_

We have made a wall And take it gravely.

_Second Spirit_

The pensive vagary That led us to return to earth Welcomes these pretty illusions. Stone wall, hill, and evening Become the touch of spice Precious to our weariness.

_Third Spirit_

The animated brevity Of this world is captivating! We have journeyed inward To the ever-distant center of life, Where language is a universe Seething with variations, And form becomes the changing warmth Of wrestling influences; Where motion is the plunging light of thoughts Dying upon each other.

_First Spirit_

We find an incredulous pleasure In changing from violent influences To breath that is mutilated with outlines. With a subtle suspicion, we greet The tiny fables of our hands and feet. We take the little blindness of eyes To reassure ourselves That the fables will not vanish. Humorously we trade Languages, like one who gives a plateau For a drop of old liquor!

_Second Spirit_

Once we were germs of thought Squirming under elastic disguises-- The bank-clerk inscribing tombstones; The poet playing surgeon to his heart; The cardinal starving his flesh. Our bodies were images made by thought And symbolizing the pain of its birth. Murder, love, and theft Were only struggling experiments Made by germs of thought emerging to form.

_Third Spirit_

What men call mysticism Is the lull in which their germ Of thought compensates itself By dreaming of a future form. But when the struggle is resumed, It often derides its inactivity, Scorning the brilliant trance of its exhaustion!

_First Spirit_

And now, three tired spirits, Seeking a weird trinket of the past, Have slipped into a replica of birth.

_Second Spirit_

Because the gliding search of our life Is lacking in one quality, amusement, We shall often return To evenings, men, and walls of stone.

INSANITY

Geroid Latour was a lean, grandiose Frenchman whose curly beard resembled a cluster of ripe raspberries. His lips were maroon-colored and slightly distended, as though forever slyly inviting some stubbornly inarticulate thought--as though slyly inviting Geroid Latour. A man’s lips and beard are two-thirds of his being, unless he is an anchorite, and even in that case they can become impressively stunted. Geroid Latour was an angel rolling in red mud. From much rolling he had acquired the pert, raspberry beard, struggling lips, and the surreptitious grandeur of a nose, but the plastic grin of a singed angel sometimes listened to his face.

His wife, having futilely tried to wrench his beard off, sought to reach his eyes with a hat-pin.

“This is unnecessary,” he expostulated. “Another woman once did it much better with a word.”

A plum-colored parrot in the room shrieked: “I am dumb! I am dumb!” Geroid Latour had painted it once, in a sober moment. Geroid and his wife wept over the parrot; slapped each other regretfully; and sat down to eat a pear. A little girl ran into the room. Her face was like a candied moon.

“My mother has died and my father wants a coffin,” she said.

Geroid Latour rubbed his hands into a perpendicular lustre--he was a facetiously candid undertaker. He took the hand of the little girl whose face was like a candied moon and they ambled down the street.

“I have lost my friendship with gutters,” mused Geroid, looking down as he walked. “They quarrel with bits of orange peel and pins. Patiently they wait for the red rain that men give them every two hundred years. Brown and red always sweep toward each other. Men are often unknowingly killed by these two huge colours treading the insects upon a path and walking to an ultimate trysting-place.”

The little girl whose face was like a molasses crescent cut off one of her yellow curls and hung it from her closed mouth.

“Why are you acting in this way?” asked Geroid.

“It’s something I’ve never done before,” she answered placidly.

Geroid stroked his raspberry beard with menacing longing but could not quite induce himself to pull it off. It would have been like cutting the throat of his mistress.

They passed an insincerely littered courtyard, tame beneath its gray tatters, and saw a black cat chasing a yellow cat.

“A cat never eats a cat--goldfish and dead lions are more to his taste,” said Geroid. “Indulgently he flees from other cats or pursues them in turn.”

“I see that you dislike melodrama,” observed a bulbous woman in penitent lavender, who was beating a carpet in the courtyard.

“You’re mistaken. Melodrama is a weirdly drunken plausibility and can not sincerely be disliked,” said Geroid. “But I must not leave without complimenting your lavender wrapper. Few people have mastered the art of being profoundly ridiculous.”

“I can see that you’re trying to be ridiculously profound,” said the woman as she threw a bucket of stale water at Geroid. He fled down the street, dragging the child with him. They left the cumbersome sterility of the city behind them and passed into the suburbs.

“Here we have a tragedy in shades of naked inertness,” said Geroid to the little girl.

“I don’t quite understand you,” answered the little girl. “I see nothing but scowls and brownness.”

A tree stood out like the black veins on an unseen fist. A square house raised its toothless snarl and all the other houses were jealous imitators. Wooden fences crossed each other with dejected, mathematical precision. A rat underneath a veranda scuffled with an empty candy box. The green of dried grasses spread out like poisonous impotence.

“Here is the house where my mother lies dead,” said the little girl.

Her father--peace germinating into greasy overalls--came down the steps. His blue eyes were parodies on the sky--discs of sinisterly humourous blue; his face reminded one of a pear that had been stepped on--resiliently flattened.

“I have come to measure your wife for her coffin,” said Geroid Latour.

“You’ll find her at the bottom of the well in the back-yard,” answered the man.

“Trying to cheat a poor old undertaker out of his business!” said Latour, waggishly.

“No, I’ll leave that to death,” said the man. “Come inside and warm your candour.”

“No, thank you, shrieks travel faster through the open air,” said Geroid, squinting at the man’s sportively cerulean eyes.

“Come out to the well and we’ll haul her up,” said the man.

The little girl darted into the house, like a disappointed hobgoblin, and Geroid Latour followed the man to the well at the rear of the house. Suddenly he saw a mountainous washerwoman dancing on her toes over the black loam. Her sparse grayish black hair flapped behind her like a dishrag and her naked body had the color of trampled snow. An empty beer-bottle was balanced on her head. She had the face of an old Columbine who still thought herself beautiful.

“A neighbour of mine,” said the man in an awed voice. “She was a ballet-dancer in her youth and every midnight she makes my back-yard a theater. In the morning she scrubs my floors. Here, in my back-yard, she chases the phantoms of her former triumphs. Moonlight turns her knee joints into miracles!”

“Ah, from enormous wildness and pretence, squeezed together, comes the little drop of happiness,” said Geroid Latour, sentimentally.

“My wife objected to my joining this woman’s midnight dance,” said the man. “To prevent her from informing the police, I killed her. I could not see a miracle ruined.”

“Only the insane are entertaining,” answered Geroid. “The egoism of sane people is gruesome--a modulated scale of complacent gaieties--but insane people often display an artificial ego which is divine. The artist, gracefully gesticulating about himself, on his divan, is hideous, but if he danced on a boulder and waved a lilac bough in one hand and a broom in the other, one could respect him.”

As Geroid finished talking the mountainous washerwoman drew nearer and stopped in front of the man. Blossoming glints of water dropped from her grayish white skin.

“You haven’t killed me yet, my dear husband,” she shouted to the man. Then, snatching the beer-bottle balanced on her head she struck at him. Geroid fled to the front gate and sped down the road. Looking back, from a safe distance, he saw the mountainous woman, the man, and the little child earnestly gesticulating in the moonlight.

POETRY

Morning light anxiously pinched the cheeks of these poplar trees. The silver blood rushed to their faces and they blushed. The garden walls forgot their stolidity for a moment and seemed inclined to leap away, but became sober again, resisting the twinkling trickery of morning light. Airily suspended tales in light and colour, of no importance to philosophers, hung over the scene. Only a snail underneath the trees, steeped in a creeping evening, lived apart from the crisp medley of morning lights. Laboriously, the snail moved through his explanation of the universe. But, to blades of grass, their lives tersely centered in green, the morning was a mysterious pressure.

The morning glowed over the garden like an incoherent rhapsody. It lacked order and thought, and the serious eyes of teachers and jesters would have spurned it. But Halfert Bolin, walking between rows of cold peonies, regarded the morning with harsh approval and spoke.

“You have the brightness and flatness of a distracted virgin but your eyes are mildly opaque. The tinseled swiftness of a courtesan’s memoirs is yours but your heart is as shy as the clink of glass. You glow like an incoherent rhapsody over the peonies in this garden!”

A woman whose painted face was a lurid snarl tapped Bolin on the shoulder. Her red hair was brushed upward into a pinnacle of burnished frenzy; her blue serge dress cast its plaintive monotone over the body of a sagging amazon; a pink straw hat dangled from her hand. Bolin allowed his admiration to bow.

“A babyish lisp slipping from you would make your grewsomeness perfect, madame,” he said.

“I don’t getcha, friend,” she responded. “I’m a sporting lady from the roadhouse down the way an’ I’m out for a morning walk. Who planted you here, old duck?”

“I’m a cow browsing amidst the peonies,” said Bolin seriously. “Without a thought, I feed on light and colour.”

“You don’t look like a cow,” said the woman, dubiously. “Maybe you’re spoofing me, you funny old turnip!”

“No, I only jest with the morning,” Bolin answered, unperturbed. “It ignores me with soaring colours and I prefer this to the minute antagonisms of human beings. You don’t understand a word I say--you bend beneath tepid apprehension, so I find a pleasure in speaking to you--it’s like humming a love-song to a mud-turtle.”

“Don’t get insultin’,” said the woman with disgruntled amazement. “I think you’re crazy.”

Bolin turned, with a smile like a distant spark, and walked away between the peonies. The woman regarded him a moment, while a fascinated frown battled with her painted face. Then she strode after him and gripped his arm.

“Hey, watcha leavin’ me for?” she said in a piteously strident voice.

“For the peonies in this garden,” answered Bolin, mildly.

“Listen, don’t get mad at me,” she said. “I don’t care whether you’re crazy or not. I like your face.”

Bolin gazed at her while sorrow loosened his face and made it glisten spaciously.

“Can you become as spontaneously tranquil as these peonies?” he asked.

The woman tendered him her dazed frown, like an anxious servant.

“Walk with me and be quiet unless I ask you to speak,” said Bolin with sudden harshness.

Obediently she laid a hand on his arm and they strolled down the path between the peonies. She sidled along like an inspired puppet--she seemed a doll touched to life by some Christ. Upon her painted face a nun and a violinist grappled tentatively and her lips made a red scarf fallen from the struggle. Bolin left the peonies and wandered down the road. They came upon a boulder clad in an outline of smashed spears. Queen Anne’s Lace grew close to its base, like the remnants of some revel.

“This is the head of a philosopher,” said Bolin.

The woman jerkily turned her body, while pallid perplexity ate into her paint and made her face narrow.

“You can speak,” said Bolin.

“It looks like a rock,” she answered in the voice of a child clinking his fetters.

“We have both spoken words,” said Bolin mildly.

The shy blindness on her face glided to and fro, like a prisoner. As she strolled with Bolin she still seemed a puppet dragged along the dust of a road by some Christ. Bolin’s middle-aged face whistled, with limpid chagrin, to his youth. His high cheek-bones were like hidden fists straining against his sallow skin.

They came upon a dead rabbit stiffening by the roadside.

“Bury him,” said Bolin, gravely.

The woman clutched at her habitual self.

“S-a-a-y, what’s the idea?” she asked in a shrilly lengthened voice.

“Bury him,” repeated Bolin gravely.

With a dazed giggle she picked a dead branch from the ground and jabbed at the loose black loam. Then she gingerly prodded the dead rabbit with the branch, shoving it into the depression she had made. She scooped earth over it with her foot.

“Now we’re both crazy,” she said uncertainly, and her nervous smile was the juggled wreck of a silver helmet.

“You have buried your meekness,” said Bolin, calmly amused. “Now walk beside me and do not speak unless, being brave, you desire to leave me.”

The woman stood gaping at him, like a vision poignantly doubting the magician who has created it. Sullenness made her lips straight for a moment, then faded into twitching awe. She slid her arm into his and once more seemed a doll dragged along the dust of a road by some distracted giant. Bolin retraced his steps; he and the woman passed by the garden of cold peonies and came to a bend in the road. Late afternoon blundered sedately through shades of green foliage beneath them. Below the hilltop on which they stood, a barn-like house crouched, its tan cerements repelling the afternoon light.

The woman tapped her chin with two fingers in a drum-beat of reality.

“Gotta get back to work, old dear,” she said, amiably squinting at Bolin.

Bolin’s sallow face shook once and became chiseled apathy.

“So do I,” he answered, his voice like the accidental ring of light metals. “I’m the new waiter Foley hired last week. You’ve been too busy to notice me much.”

For a full minute the woman stood staring at him, her hands upon her hips, her slightly bulging gray eyes like water-drops threatening to roll down her shattered face.

“You’re the guy they call Nutty Louie,” she said at last, as though confiding a ludicrously startling message to herself.

Then for another full minute she stood staring at him.

“We’re bughouse,” she said in a mesmerised whisper. “Bughouse.”

Bolin walked forward without a word. The woman gaped at him for a moment and then ran after him as she had in the garden of peonies.

RELIGION

Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat and read the Bible. Green waves died upon each other, like a cohesive fantasy. Each small wave rose as high as the other and ended in a swan’s neck of white interrogation. Sunlight blinded the water as style dazes the contents of a poem and the blue sky lifted itself to symmetrical stupor. The air fell against one like a soothing religion. The bristling melancholia of pine trees lined the wide river. But Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible. He read the Songs of Solomon, and a sensual pantomime made a taut stage of his face. When not reading the Songs of Solomon he was as staidly poised as a monk’s folded arms. He had borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he called God. Different shades of green leaves were, to him, the playful jealousies of a presence; the tossed colours of birds became the ineffably light gestures of a lost poet.

His Swedish peasant’s face had singed its dimples in a bit of sophistication but his eyes were undeceived. His heart was a secluded soliloquy transforming the shouts of the world into tinkling surmises. His broad nose and long lips were always at ease and his ruddy skin held the texture of fresh bunting. His eyes knew the unkindled reticence of a rustic boy.

This man of one mood sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible. He reached the mouth of the river and drifted out to sea. The sea was a menacing lethargy of rhythm: green swells sensed his row-boat with dramatic leisure. A sea gull skimmed over the water, like a haphazard adventure. Looking up from his Bible Alvin Tor saw the body of a woman floating beside his boat. With one jerk his face swerved into blankness. The tip of his tongue met his upper lip as though it were a fading rim of reality. The fingers of one hand distressed his flaxen hair.

The woman floated on her back with infinite abandon. Little ripples of green water died fondling her body. The green swells barely lifting her were great rhythms disturbed by an inert discord. Sunlight, fumbling at her body, relinquished its promiscuous desires and became abashed. _Her wet brown hair had a drugged gentility: its short dark curls hugged her head with despondent understanding. Her face had been washed to an imperturbable transparency: it had the whiteness of reclining foam overcast with a twinge of green--the sea had lent her its skin._ Her eyes were limply unworried and violated to gray disintegration. In separated bits of outlines the remains of thinly impudent features were slipping from her face. The bloated pity of black and white garments hid her lean body.

As Alvin Tor watched her, tendrils of peace gradually interfered with the blankness on his face. His lips sustained an unpremeditated repose. A sensitive compassion dropped the sparks of its coming into his eyes. His clothes became a jest upon an inhuman body; the earth of him effortlessly transcended itself in the gesture of his arm flung out to the woman.

“Impalpable relic of a soul, the spirit you held must have severed its shadow to preserve you forever from the waves,” he said, his face blindfolded with ecstasy, “for you grasp the water with immortal relaxation. You are not a body--you are beauty receding into a resistless seclusion.”

“Kind fool, musically stifling himself in a row-boat--made kind by the desperate tenderness of a lie--you are serenading the chopped bodies of your emotions,” said the woman.