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It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined Half of the night with our old friend Who'd showed us in the end To a bed I reached in one drunk stride. Already I lay snug, And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side. I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug, Suddenly, from behind, In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed: Your instep to my heel, My shoulder-blades against your chest. It was not sex, but I could feel The whole strength of your body set, Or braced, to mine, And locking me to you As if we were still twenty-two When our grand passion had not yet Become familial. My quick sleep had deleted all Of intervening time and place. I only knew The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

This is an old apartment and therefore the mirrors are huge and ornate. They go with the high ornate ceilings. There’s one such mirror in the living room and another in the bedroom. Both have intricately carved borders and a leafy crest on top. In the living room these have been painted over in white, but in the bedroom it’s still the original gilt rococo. Both mirrors sit on top of fireplaces and are as big as tombs. I think the descriptive term for them is French Regency Baroque. The mirror in the bathroom is pretty big too, and again somewhat ornate. And there are two other mirrors here as well. Not bad for a small, one-bedroom flat. The problem is I’ve never been too fond of mirrors. I rarely look into them, and only then to make sure my hair isn’t sticking up, or there’s no toothpaste showing, or when I’m fine-trimming the beard, to make sure I’ve missed no section. Oh, there are exceptional other occasions. Once when I got a red eye on a transatlantic flight, for example, I kept checking on the progress of the red’s disappearance. Or when I fell on gravel and got an ugly friction wound on my forehead, I had to first deal with applying the dressing, then keep an eye on how that healing was coming along. Very slowly, as it happened. As for gazing into the mirror to see if  I look OK enough to go out into the world, or — perish the thought — if I look attractive today, the answer is no way!Que sera, sera, as the song goes. Tiny children love the mirror and it’s very pleasant to watch them gazing into it. Dogs don’t understand it and bark fiercely at the rival dog that’s their reflection. I once gave a woman a full-length mirror as an Xmas present. It wasn’t ornate or gilded, and it got smashed soon afterwards, and seven years of bad luck followed. But if   I want to look at myself in the mirror regularly or for lengthy periods there’s plenty opportunity for it in this apartment. I could even stand naked and see everything. And as Monsieur Baudelaire reminds us, according to the immortal principles of 1789, everyone has equal rights; therefore I have the right to behold myself with pleasure or distaste. It is between me and my conscience.

Huge vapours brood above the clifted shore, Night o'er the ocean settles, dark and mute, Save where is heard the repercussive roar Of drowsy billows, on the rugged foot Of rocks remote; or still more distant tone Of seamen, in the anchored bark, that tell The watch relieved; or one deep voice alone, Singing the hour, and bidding "strike the bell." All is black shadow, but the lucid line Marked by the light surf on the level sand, Or where afar, the ship-lights faintly shine Like wandering fairy fires, that oft on land Mislead the pilgrim; such the dubious ray That wavering reason lends, in life's long darkling way.

(Life and Contacts) “Vocat aestus in umbram” Nemesianus Ec. IV. E. P. ODE POUR L’ÉLECTION DE SON SÉPULCHRE For three years, out of key with his time, He strove to resuscitate the dead art Of poetry; to maintain “the sublime” In the old sense. Wrong from the start— No, hardly, but, seeing he had been born In a half savage country, out of date; Bent resolutely on wringing lilies from the acorn; Capaneus; trout for factitious bait: “Idmen gar toi panth, os eni Troie Caught in the unstopped ear; Giving the rocks small lee-way The chopped seas held him, therefore, that year. His true Penelope was Flaubert, He fished by obstinate isles; Observed the elegance of Circe’s hair Rather than the mottoes on sun-dials. Unaffected by “the march of events,” He passed from men’s memory in l’an trentiesme De son eage; the case presents No adjunct to the Muses’ diadem. II The age demanded an image Of its accelerated grimace, Something for the modern stage, Not, at any rate, an Attic grace; Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries Of the inward gaze; Better mendacities Than the classics in paraphrase! The “age demanded” chiefly a mould in plaster, Made with no loss of time, A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster Or the “sculpture” of rhyme. III The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc. Supplants the mousseline of Cos, The pianola “replaces” Sappho’s barbitos. Christ follows Dionysus, Phallic and ambrosial Made way for macerations; Caliban casts out Ariel. All things are a flowing, Sage Heracleitus says; But a tawdry cheapness Shall reign throughout our days. Even the Christian beauty Defects—after Samothrace; We see to kalon Decreed in the market place. Faun’s flesh is not to us, Nor the saint’s vision. We have the press for wafer; Franchise for circumcision. All men, in law, are equals. Free of Peisistratus, We choose a knave or an eunuch To rule over us. A bright Apollo, tin andra, tin eroa, tina theon, What god, man, or hero Shall I place a tin wreath upon? IV These fought, in any case, and some believing, pro domo, in any case ... Some quick to arm, some for adventure, some from fear of weakness, some from fear of censure, some for love of slaughter, in imagination, learning later ... some in fear, learning love of slaughter; Died some pro patria, non dulce non et decor” ... walked eye-deep in hell believing in old men’s lies, then unbelieving came home, home to a lie, home to many deceits, home to old lies and new infamy; usury age-old and age-thick and liars in public places. Daring as never before, wastage as never before. Young blood and high blood, Fair cheeks, and fine bodies; fortitude as never before frankness as never before, disillusions as never told in the old days, hysterias, trench confessions, laughter out of dead bellies. V There died a myriad, And of the best, among them, For an old bitch gone in the teeth, For a botched civilization. Charm, smiling at the good mouth, Quick eyes gone under earth’s lid, For two gross of broken statues, For a few thousand battered books. YEUX GLAUQUES Gladstone was still respected, When John Ruskin produced “Kings Treasuries”; Swinburne And Rossetti still abused. Foetid Buchanan lifted up his voice When that faun’s head of hers Became a pastime for Painters and adulterers. The Burne-Jones cartons Have preserved her eyes; Still, at the Tate, they teach Cophetua to rhapsodize; Thin like brook-water, With a vacant gaze. The English Rubaiyat was still-born In those days. The thin, clear gaze, the same Still darts out faun-like from the half-ruin’d face, Questing and passive .... “Ah, poor Jenny’s case” ... Bewildered that a world Shows no surprise At her last maquero’s Adulteries. “SIENA MI FE’, DISFECEMI MAREMMA’” Among the pickled foetuses and bottled bones, Engaged in perfecting the catalogue, I found the last scion of the Senatorial families of Strasbourg, Monsieur Verog. For two hours he talked of Gallifet; Of Dowson; of the Rhymers’ Club; Told me how Johnson (Lionel) died By falling from a high stool in a pub ... But showed no trace of alcohol At the autopsy, privately performed— Tissue preserved—the pure mind Arose toward Newman as the whiskey warmed. Dowson found harlots cheaper than hotels; Headlam for uplift; Image impartially imbued With raptures for Bacchus, Terpsichore and the Church. So spoke the author of “The Dorian Mood,” M. Verog, out of step with the decade, Detached from his contemporaries, Neglected by the young, Because of these reveries. BRENNEBAUM The sky-like limpid eyes, The circular infant’s face, The stiffness from spats to collar Never relaxing into grace; The heavy memories of Horeb, Sinai and the forty years, Showed only when the daylight fell Level across the face Of Brennbaum “The Impeccable.” MR. NIXON In the cream gilded cabin of his steam yacht Mr. Nixon advised me kindly, to advance with fewer Dangers of delay. “Consider ”Carefully the reviewer. “I was as poor as you are; “When I began I got, of course, “Advance on royalties, fifty at first,” said Mr. Nixon, “Follow me, and take a column, “Even if you have to work free. “Butter reviewers. From fifty to three hundred “I rose in eighteen months; “The hardest nut I had to crack “Was Dr. Dundas. “I never mentioned a man but with the view “Of selling my own works. “The tip’s a good one, as for literature “It gives no man a sinecure.” And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece. And give up verse, my boy, There’s nothing in it.” *        *        *        * Likewise a friend of Bloughram’s once advised me: Don’t kick against the pricks, Accept opinion. The “Nineties” tried your game And died, there’s nothing in it. X Beneath the sagging roof The stylist has taken shelter, Unpaid, uncelebrated, At last from the world’s welter Nature receives him, With a placid and uneducated mistress He exercises his talents And the soil meets his distress. The haven from sophistications and contentions Leaks through its thatch; He offers succulent cooking; The door has a creaking latch. XI “Conservatrix of Milésien” Habits of mind and feeling, Possibly. But in Ealing With the most bank-clerkly of Englishmen? No, “Milésian” is an exaggeration. No instinct has survived in her Older than those her grandmother Told her would fit her station. XII “Daphne with her thighs in bark Stretches toward me her leafy hands,”— Subjectively. In the stuffed-satin drawing-room I await The Lady Valentine’s commands, Knowing my coat has never been Of precisely the fashion To stimulate, in her, A durable passion; Doubtful, somewhat, of the value Of well-gowned approbation Of literary effort, But never of The Lady Valentine’s vocation: Poetry, her border of ideas, The edge, uncertain, but a means of blending With other strata Where the lower and higher have ending; A hook to catch the Lady Jane’s attention, A modulation toward the theatre, Also, in the case of revolution, A possible friend and comforter. *        *        *        * Conduct, on the other hand, the soul “Which the highest cultures have nourished” To Fleet St. where Dr. Johnson flourished; Beside this thoroughfare The sale of half-hose has Long since superseded the cultivation Of Pierian roses. Envoi (1919) Go, dumb-born book, Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes: Hadst thou but song As thou hast subjects known, Then were there cause in thee that should condone Even my faults that heavy upon me lie And build her glories their longevity. Tell her that sheds Such treasure in the air, Recking naught else but that her graces give Life to the moment, I would bid them live As roses might, in magic amber laid, Red overwrought with orange and all made One substance and one colour Braving time. Tell her that goes With song upon her lips But sings not out the song, nor knows The maker of it, some other mouth, May be as fair as hers, Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers, When our two dusts with Waller's shall be laid, Siftings on siftings in oblivion, Till change hath broken down All things save Beauty alone.

1920 (Mauberley) I

The word, the stone, the ringing phone, the part of me that wants to be alone, the vow of silence in the reeds; God descends in ravenese. The vinegar tasters dip their fingers, make their faces: stoic, bitter, strangely sweet. The seeker leaves for Bangladesh, the prophets check for signs of theft, the singers sing for what is left. The children breathe. Come of age. Search the faces for a taste of what's to come: the widening road, the row your boat, he choked with weeds, the rabbit hole. This holding on. The word, the stone, the ringing phone. The part of we that answers when alone.

It could of course be silk. Fifty yards or so of the next closest thing to water to the touch, or it could just as easily be a shaft of  wood crumpling a man struck between spaulder and helm. But now, with the rain making a noisy erasure of this town, it is the flash that arrives and leaves at nearly the same moment. It’s what I want to be in this moment, in this doorway, because much as I’d love to be the silk-shimmer against the curve of anyone’s arm, as brutal and impeccable as it’d be to soar from a crossbow with a whistle and have a man switch off upon my arrival, it is nothing compared to that moment when I eat the dark, draw shadows in quick strokes across wall and start a tongue counting down to thunder. That counting that says, I am this far. I am this close.

I Comstock stands in the densely odorous kitchen sniffing Mrs. Yapp’s squab pies. His hunger makes him wide awake and he can imagine Mrs. Yapp twenty years ago when she was a bouncing Evelina and I delight to see them there, Comstock and Mrs. Yapp, in the creaking steaming kitchen of darkly scarred wood beside the great black doubtless clang of the stove being human, in 1836, in the sure conviction that the human had better be fed. The pies bubble up— apples, bacon, onions, brown sugar and breast of pigeon— “A cork’s no good without the bottle, Mrs. Yapp!” She grins and kicks his shin and I turn the page. II It’s actually not a very good novel— over-invested in local color... And the same may be said about thee and me, in 2036, by the Supreme Kakutani. III Oh, once there was a lad named Marky who loved on his bread excessive cheese; oh, to write bright comments in a book’s margins was for him quite larky and his daughter referred to an elephant when she heard him sneeze. Ah, he felt the human mattered keenly, all un-cut and un-dried, though to the gods our tumult may seem a paltry flap— it was a human, after all, wrote Hardy’s “Hap”... This Marky lived a while, my braves, a while and then he died! Honor the cork of Comstock and the pies of Mrs. Yapp.

About the only thing I thought I knew was that nothing I’d ever know would do any good. Sunrise, say, or that the part of the horse’s hoof that most resembles a human palm is called the frog; certain chords on the guitar of no mercantile use; the abstruse circuitry of an envelope quatrain; even the meaning of horripilation. Sometimes on a flatland mound the ancients had made, I took heart in the pointlessness of stars and lay there until my teeth chattered. I earned my last Boy Scout merit badge building a birdhouse out of license plates manufactured by felons in the big house. No more paramilitary organizations for me, I said, ten years before I was drafted. I had skills. Sure-footedness and slick fielding. Eventually I would learn to unhook a bra one-handed, practicing on my friend, his sister's worn over his T-shirt (I took my turns too). One Easter Sunday I hid through the church service among the pipes of the organ and still did not have faith, although my ears rang until Monday. I began to know that little worth knowing was knowable and faith was delusion. I began to believe I believed in believing nothing I was supposed to believe in, except the stars, which, like me, were not significant, except for their light, meaning I loved them for their pointlessness. I believed I owned them somehow. A C major 7th chord was beautiful and almost rare. The horse I loved foundered and had to be put down. The middle rhyme in an envelope quatrain was not imprisoned if it was right. In cold air a nipple horripilates and rises, the sun comes up and up and up, a star that bakes the eggs in a Boy Scout license plate birdhouse. God was in music and music was God. A drill sergeant seized me by my dog tag chain and threatened to beat me to a pile of bloody guts for the peace sign I’d chiseled in the first of my two tags, the one he said they’d leave in my mouth before they zipped the body bag closed. Yet one more thing I’d come to know. He also said that Uncle Sam owned my ass, no more true than my ownership of the stars. I can play a C major 7th chord in five or six places on the neck of a guitar. A stabled horse’s frog degrades; a wild horse’s becomes a callus, smooth as leather. Stars are invisible in rainy weather, something any fool knows, of course.

Always behind my back I hear The spastic clicking of jerked knees And other automatic reactions Tracking me through the years to where Time’s winged chariot is double Parked near the eternity frontier And in such moments I want to participate In human life less and less But when I do the obligatory double take And glance behind me into the dark green future All I see stretching out are vast Arizona republics of more