Mina Loy

Nightingale singing—gale of Nanking Sing—mystery of Ming-dynasty sing ing in Ming Syringa Myringa Singer Song-winged sing-wind syringa ringer Song-wing sing long syringa lingerer

This misalliance follows the custom for female children To adhere to maternal practices While the atheist father presides over the prattle of the churchgoer with ironical commentary    from his arm-chair But by whichever religious route to brute reality our forebears speed us There is often a pair of idle adult accomplices in duplicity to impose upon their brood an assumed acceptance of the grace of God defamed as human megalomania seeding the Testament with inconcievable chastisement and of Christ who come with his light of toilless lilies To say “fear not   it is I” wanting us to be fearful He who bowed the ocean tossed with holy feet which supposedly dead are suspended over head neat- ly crossed in anguish wounded with red varnish From these slow-drying bloods of mysticism mysteriously the something-soul emerges miserably and instinct (of economy) in every race for reconstructing debris has planted an avenging face in outer darkness . . . The lonely peering eye of humanity looked into the Néant and turned away . . . Ova’s consciousness impulsive to commit itself to justice —to arise and walk its innate     straight way out of the accidence of circumstance— collects the levitate chattels of its will and makes for the magnetic horizon of liberty with the soul’s foreverlasting opposition to disintegration So this child of Exodus with her heritage of emigration often “sets out to seek her fortune” in her turn trusting to terms of literature dodging the breeders’ determination not to return “entities sent on consignment” by their maker Nature except in a condition of moral effacement Lest Paul and Peter never notice the creatures ever had had Fathers and Mothers They were disgraced in their duty should such spirits take an express passage through the family bodies to arrive at Eternity as lovely     as they originally promised So on whatever days she chose to “run away” the very street corners of Kilburn close in upon Ova to deliver her into the hands of her procreators Oracle of civilization ‘Thou shalt not live by dreams alone but by every discomfort that proceedeth out of legislation’

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction The business of the bland sun Has no affair with me In my congested cosmos of agony From which there is no escape On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations Or in contraction To the pinpoint nucleus of being Locate an irritation            without It is                                           within Within It is without The sensitized area Is identical            with the extensity Of intension I am the false quantity In the harmony of physiological potentiality To which Gaining self-control I should be consonant In time Pain is no stronger than the resisting force Pain calls up in me The struggle is equal The open window is full of a voice A fashionable portrait painter Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment Sings “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly All the girls are nice Whether they wear their hair in curls Or — ” At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization The conception                       Brute Why? The irresponsibility of the male Leaves woman her superior Inferiority. He is running upstairs I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony Incidentally with the exhaustion of control I reach the summit And gradually subside into anticipation of Repose Which never comes. For another mountain is growing up Which          goaded by the unavoidable I must traverse Traversing myself Something in the delirium of night hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself There is a climax in sensibility When pain surpassing itself Becomes exotic And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative   poles of sensation Uniting the opposing and resisting forces In lascivious revelation Relaxation Negation of myself as a unit Vacuum interlude I should have been emptied of life Giving life For consciousness in crises          races Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes Have I not Somewhere Scrutinized A dead white feathered moth Laying eggs? A moment Being realization Can Vitalized by cosmic initiation Furnish an adequate apology For the objective Agglomeration of activities Of a life LIFE A leap with nature Into the essence Of unpredicted Maternity Against my thigh Tough of infinitesimal motion Scarcely perceptible Undulation Warmth           moisture Stir of incipient life Precipitating into me The contents of the universe Mother I am Identical With infinite Maternity Indivisible Acutely I am absorbed Into The was — is — ever — shall — be Of cosmic reproductivity Rises from the subconscious Impression of a cat With blind kittens Among her legs Same undulating life-stir I am that cat Rises from the sub-conscious Impression of small animal carcass Covered with blue bottles — Epicurean — And through the insects Waves that same undulation of living Death Life I am knowing All about Unfolding The next morning Each woman-of-the-people Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet Doing hushed service Each woman-of-the-people Wearing a halo A ludicrous little halo Of which she is sublimely unaware I once heard in a church — Man and woman God made them — Thank God.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations A silver Lucifer Lunar Baedeker...Lucifer A Baedeker is a series name of popular guidebooks. Another modern poem with “Baedeker” in the title is T. S. Eliot’s “Burbank with a Baedeker: Bleistein with a Cigar” (1919). Lucifer is the former angel name for Satan, which has been used to name the morning star, that is the planet Venus serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies Peris Peris “In Persian myth, an elf or fairy, male or female, represented as a descendant of fallen angels, excluded from Paradise till their penance is accomplished” (Century Dictionary) in livery in livery Dressed for their job prepare Lethe Lethe River of forgetfulness in Hades for posthumous parvenues parvenues Those who have recently come into wealth Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria infusoria Class of protozoa; “so called because found in infusions of decaying animal or vegetable matter” (OED) from Pharoah’s tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdays doomsdays The end of the world or Judgment Day, usually in the singular Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorous phosphorous “Phosphorous” (with a capital “P”) is Venus, the morning star, archaically referred to as Lucifer, mentioned in the first line of this poem. the eye-white sky-light white-light district white-light district Possible alternative to red-light district. The term appears in Theodore Dreiser's book A Hoosier Holiday(1916). of lunar lusts Stellectric Stellectric A word formed from “stellar” (star) and “electric” signs “Wing shows on Starway” “Zodiac carrousel” Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis Necropolis Literally: a city of corpses From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques Odalisques “Female slaves or concubines in an Eastern harem” (OED) and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros Eros God of Love in Greek mythology; also, the name of an asteroid, discovered in 1898 obsolete And “Immortality” mildews ... in the museums of the moon “Nocturnal cyclops” “Crystal concubine” Pocked with personification the fossil virgin of the skies waxes and wanes

The human cylinders Revolving in the enervating dusk That wraps each closer in the mystery Of singularity Among the litter of a sunless afternoon Having eaten without tasting Talked without communion And at least two of us Loved a very little Without seeking To know if our two miseries In the lucid rush-together of automatons Could form one opulent wellbeing Simplifications of men In the enervating dusk Your indistinctness Serves me the core of the kernel of you When in the frenzied reaching out of intellect to intellect Leaning brow to brow       communicative Over the abyss of the potential Concordance of respiration Shames Absence of corresponding between the verbal sensory And reciprocity Of conception And expression Where each extrudes beyond the tangible One thin pale trail of speculation From among us we have sent out Into the enervating dusk One little whining beast Whose longing Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow And one elastic tentacle of intuition To quiver among the stars The impartiality of the absolute Routs      the polemic Or which of us Would not Receiving the holy-ghost Catch it      and caging Lose it Or in the problematic Destroy the Universe With a solution

The threewomen who all walked In the same dress And it had falling ferns on it Skipped parallel To the progress Of Giovanni Franchi Giovanni Franchi’s wrists flicked Flickeringly as he flacked them His wrists explained things Infectiously by way of his adolescence His adolescence was all there was of him Whatever was left was rather awkward His adolescence tuned to the tops of trees Descended to the fallacious nobility Of his first pair of trousers They were tubular      flapped friezily The color of coppered mustard What matter Were they not the first No others could ever be the first again The ferns on the flounces of the threewomen Began fading as she thought of it Tea table problems for insane asylyms Are démodé Démodé Allow us to rely on our instincts The threewomen was composed of three instincts Each sniffing divergently directed draughts The first instinct    first again    (may Renascent gods save us from the enigmatic Penetralia of Firstness) Was to be faithful to a man       first The second       to be loyal to herself first She would have to find which self first The third which might as well have been first Was to find out how many toes the Philosopher Giovanni Bapini had       first Giovanni Franchi hooligan-faced and latin-born You imagine what he looked like Looked as nearly as he could as the Philosopher looked His articulations were excellent Still    where Giovanni Bapini was cymophanous Giovanni Franchi was merely pale He scuttled winsomely To its distribution from a puffer For the declaration of War His acolytian sincerity The sensitive down among his freckles Fell in with the patriotic souls of flags Red white and green flags      fillipping piazzas When the “National Idea” arrived on the Milan Express Continually cutting off an angle from Paschkowski’s Through plate-glass swingings To look as busy bodily As the philosopher’s brain was As Giovanni Bapini importuned mobs From monumental gums To the sparky detritus From the hurried cigarette Of his disciple Whose papa and mama kept a trattoria Audaciously squatting right opposite the Pitti Palace The Pitti Palace however stolid      could hardly help noticing Being an aristocrat it went on looking As plainly piled up as ever The Pitti Palace has never been known to mention the trattoria Or mention Giovanni Franchi Sitting in it At a book It could not see from that distance Giovanni watching the munchers supporting his parents With an eye On assuring himself Of their sufficient impression By erudition He was so young That explains so much No book ever explained what to be young is But they look so much more important for that Giovanni was in continuous ecstacy Induced by the imposing look of them When Giovanni Bapini spoke of them He could not tell How completely more precious Would be such knowledge As how many toes the philosopher Giovanni Bapini had Now the threewomen For pity’s sake Let us think of her as she    to save time Seeing the minor Giovanni Sitting at the major Giovanni’s feet Made sure he must be counting his toes All to the contrary    he was picking the philosopher’s brains Happy in the security that when he had done He would still be youthful enough to sort out his own He listened at the elder’s lips That taught him of earthquakes and Of women— His manners were abominable He would kill a woman Quite inconspicuously it is true And neglect to attend her funeral I mean the older man And what he told Giovanni Franchi About these pernicious persons Was so extremely good for him It entirely spoilt his first love-affair To such an extent          it never came off We have read of Trattoria    meaning eating house. Piazzas    or squares The Pitti Palace    enormous And Paschkowski’s      for beer All are in Firenze Firenze is Florence Some think it is a woman with flowers in her hair But NO       it is a city with stones on the streets Giovanni Bapini often said Everybody in Firenze knows me And everybody did Excepting—That is      she didn’t She never knew what he was Or how he was himself Yet she uniquely was the one To speculate      upon the number of his toes The days growing longer Fulfilling her of curiousity She made a moth’s net Of metaphor and miracles And on the incandescent breath of civilizations She chased by moon-and-morn light Philosopher’s toes As virginal      as had he never worn them Clear of ‘white marks means money’ All quicks and cores They fluttered to her fantasy Fell into her lap While she gathered her ferny flounces about them They inappropriately passed But Giovanni Franchi was there He almost winked it at her That he was there His eyes were intrepid with phantom secrets The Philosopher had flung to him And as she tripped by him She guessed      these all All    but the number of those toes She made diurnal pilgrimage To the trattoria To eat Trout    that might have been trained for circuses If minarets    grew in miniature whirlpools And mayonnaise       that helped her to forget That what is underneath       need never matter She put all minor riddles out of her Such as What was the under-cover of Franchi’s book Telling to the plaid pattern of the tablecloth Too shy to interrogate She sent ambassadors To the disciple They returned Oh rats Quite manifest    that Giovanni Franchi Some semieffigy Damned by scholiums Knew no more      how many toes— Than      Giovanni Bapini knew himself