1
I was born downtown on a wintry day
And under the roof where Poe expired;
Tended by nuns my mother lay
Dark-haired and beautiful and tired.
Doctors and cousins paid their call,
The rabbi and my father helped.
A crucifix burned on the wall
Of the bright room where I was whelped.
At one week all my family prayed,
Stuffed wine and cotton in my craw;
The rabbi blessed me with a blade
According to the Mosaic law.
The white steps blazed in Baltimore
And cannas and white statuary.
I went home voluble and sore
Influenced by Abraham and Mary.
2
At one the Apocalypse had spoken,
Von Moltke fell, I was housebroken.
At two how could I understand
The murder of Archduke Ferdinand?
France was involved with history,
I with my thumbs when I was three.
A sister came, we neared a war,
Paris was shelled when I was four.
I joined in our peach-kernel drive
For poison gas when I was five.
At six I cheered the big parade,
Burned sparklers and drank lemonade
At seven I passed at school though I
Was far too young to say Versailles.
At eight the Boom began to tire,
I tried to set our house on fire.
The Bolsheviks had drawn the line,
Lenin was stricken, I was nine.
-What evils do not retrograde
To my first odious decade?
3
Saints by whose pages I would swear,
My Zarathustra, Edward Lear,
Ulysses, Werther, fierce Flaubert,
Where are my books of yesteryear?
Sixteen and sixty are a pair;
We twice live by philosophies.
My marginalia of the hair,
Are you at one with Socrates?
Thirty subsides yet does not dare,
Sixteen and sixty bang their fists.
How is it that I no longer care
For Kant and the Transcendentalists?
Public libraries lead to prayer,
Ễy đoxã hy & AóYoC – still
Eliot and John are always there
To tempt our admirari nil.
4
I lived in a house of panels,
Victorian, darkly made;
A virgin in bronze and marble
Leered from the balustrade.
The street was a tomb of virtues,
Autumnal for dreams and haunts;
I gazed from the polished windows
Toward a neighborhood of aunts.
Mornings I practiced piano,
Wrote elegies and sighed;
The evenings were conversations
Of poetry and suicide.
Weltschmerz and mysticism,
What tortures we undergo!
I loved with the love of Heinrich
And the poison of Edgar Poe.
5
The days of my youth were rebels,
Dark-eyed and pale as light.
My house was divided against me
Abstractly, like wrong and right.
I haunted the halls of labor,
To whatever slums I’d roam
My father would come in a Packard
And solemnly drive me home.
I raved like a scarlet banner,
Brave cloth of a single piece.
I learned to despise all uncles,
All Congressmen, all police.
I hated the coin of kindness,
Good deeds of the Octopus;
It was evil to give to beggars
What beggars could give to us.
O Communist youth of anger
Who dreamed of the world of parks
Of culture and rest, I dream now
Of the culture and rest of Marx.
6
The third-floor thoughts of discontented youth
Once saw the city, hardened against truth,
Get set for war. He coupled a last rime
And waited for the summons to end time.
It came. The box-like porch where he had sat,
The four bright boxes of a medium flat,
Chair he had sat in, glider where he lay
Reading the poets and prophets of his day,
He assigned abstractly to his dearest friend,
Glanced at the little street hooked at the end,
The line of poplars lately touched with spring,
Lovely as Laura, breathless, beckoning.
Mother was calm, until he left the door;
The trolley passed his sweetheart’s house before
She was awake. The armory was cold,
But naked, shivering, shocked he was enrolled.
It was the death he never quite forgot
Through the four years of death, and like as not
The true death of the best of all of us
Whose present life is largely posthumous.
7
For four years stupified by martial law
The poet in khaki held his tongue. Cowand
Or patriot or both, he learned the raw
Truth of the life where only rifles flowered.
His primum mobile was inertia, Fate
As the poor devils called it when they tried
To justify the distance of their state
From that of free men on the civilian side.
The chief hell was stupidity, the vast
And national ignorance of the dividing line
Between the many and the few. He classed
The majority of his fellowmen as swine.
Unlike the others, he revered the bar
And eagle of authority. He loathed
The naked officer and his choice cigar
Yet loved him dutifully when fully clothed.
He seldom doubted that the Cause was just
And did his service with a soldier’s sloth.
In his commanders he imposed his trust
-God, he presumed, was on the side of both.
8
When from the Malay shore
Southward from Singapore
Straight to Van Diemen’s door
In green regalia
Swept the cruel Japanese
Through the antipodes
Driving to her white knees
Virgin Australia,
Terribly undermanned,
Scarcely a fighting band
Stood to protect the land
From the invasion;
Nor could there be released
One from the Middle East
Lest the great German beast
Join with the Asian.
Terror on Melbourne fell,
Sydney and Broome as well,
What prophet could foretell
To the contrary?
Until the splendid day
Troops from the U.S. A.
Swarmed from the dirty gray
Buxom Queen Mary.
Wild went the nation then,
Matron and Magdalen
Mad for ten thousand men
Come like Crusaders..
Schoolgirl and ancient dame
Housewife and whore the same
All who could walk became
Night promenaders.
War is a love affair,
Kisses, vin ordinaire,
Widows in underwear
Welcome sweet lovers;
After brief dialogue
Couple the pig and dog
-God saves the Decalogue
Till peace recovers.
9
The chill air of the hired room
Is clothing enough for the radiant flesh
Of lovers who create their own shelter
And bring, with a touch of humor, flowers.
And early to bed and early to bed
The wicked Miss and the wicked Mister
Enrolled in the book of the serious host
And Jehovah’s ledger forever and ever.
Zircons and purple in the oaken bed
And nobody knows but Mrs. Higgins
Whose is the Bible and the Kama Sutra
Laid on the basin, with a touch of humor.
And manifest sadness, the tireless kiss,
Vivacity of Bess the landlady’s daughter,
These and others will render suspicious
The war-love pattern of every other.
But just as you hint, je dois refaire
Ma beauté, good for the common people,
Something will happen with a touch of humor
Like paying the bill or having a daughter.
In the pitchy blackness, four in the morning,
Side by side when the siren sounded
We opened our arms and caught the projectile
Which wouldn’t explode because it was frightened.
And now to the Front I am gone to suffer
Because of the Liberal View and of Mother
But nobody smiles at the touch of humor,
The fact that I love you and am not Rupert.
10
I lost my father in a dire divorce,
My father lost I lost my ordered mind
And fell into high Christian intercourse
And face to face came with an ancient force.
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned.
Men died at my feet and iron fell
From nowhere, iron from the zodiac.
One time the python of the oracle
Appeared before my tent. — Immanuel,
Done is a battell on the dragon blak!
I had no joy in any man who thought,
Seeing what things the darker eye divined,
But dragged my reason toward the richest-wrought,
Three-towered and Christian-crusted juggernaut.
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned.
Two priests advised me on my rise to grace,
The one among the sacred bric-a-brac
Laughing at my devotion to my face,
The other plainly dubious of my race.
Done is a battell on the dragon blak.
I craved the beads and chains of paradise
And counted it a blessing to go blind;
Small truths alone I saw with open eyes
For in the blackest night was my sunrise.
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned.
God’s book was in my blood, I was confined
To fifty thousand years upon His rack
And no middle direction could I find.
To wicked spirits are horrid shapes assigned;
Done is a battell on the dragon blak.
11
We waged a war within a war,
A cause within a cause;
The glory of it was withheld
In keeping with the laws Whereby
the public need not know
The pitfalls of the status quo.
Love was the reason for the blood:
The black men from our land
Were seen to walk with pure white girls
Laughing and hand in hand.
This most unreasonable state
No feeling White would tolerate.
We threw each other from the trams,
We carried knives and pipes,
We sacrificed in self-defense
Some of the baser types,
But though a certain number died
You would not call it fratricide.
The women with indignant tears
Professed to love the Blacks,
And dark and woolly heads still met
With heads of English flax.
Only the love-starved could conceive
Of any marriage so naive.
Yet scarcely fifty years before
Their fathers rode to shoot
The undressed aborigines,
Though not to persecute
A fine distinction lies in that
They have no others to combat.
By order of the high command
The black men were removed
To the interior and north.
The crisis thus improved,
Even the women could detect
Their awful fall from intellect.
12
I plucked the bougainvillea
In Queensland in time of war;
The train stopped at the station
And I reached it from my door
I have never kept a flower
And this one I never shall
I thought as I laid the blossom
In the leaves of Les Fleurs du Mal.
I read my book in the desert
In the time of death and fear,
The flower slipped from the pages
And fell to my lap, my dear.
I sent it inside my letter,
The purplest kiss I knew,
And thus you abused my passion
With “A most Victorian Jew.”
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