Cancer, or, The Crab

Moonpoison, mullock of sacrifice, Suffuses the veins of the eyes Till the retina, mooncoloured, Sees the sideways motion of the cretin crab Hued thus like a tortoise askew in the glaucous moonscape A flat hot boulder it Lividly in the midst of the Doldrums Sidles The lunatic unable to bear the silent course of constellations Mad and stark naked Sidles The obol on an eyeball of a man dead from elphantiasis Sidles All three across heaven with a rocking motion. The Doldrums: 'region of calms and light baffling winds near Equator.' But the calms are rare The winds baffling but not light And the drunken boats belonging to the Crab Club Rock hot and naked to the dunning of the moon All in the pallescent Sargasso weed And windbound, seeking distraction by the light of deliverance For What are we but the excrement of non-existent noon? (Truth like starlight crookedly) What are we all but 'burial grounds abhorred by the moon'? And did the Maoris die of measles? So do we. But there is no snow here, nor lilies. The night is glutinous In a broad hearth crisscross thorn clumps Smoulder: distant fireback of copse Throws back silence: glassen ashes gleam in pond The constellations which have stopped working (?) Shimmer. No dead leaf jumps. On edge of lawn a glowworm Hangs out its state-recognized torchlamp Blocks of flowers gape dumb as windows with blinds drawn And in the centre the rugate trees Though seeming as if they go up in smoke Are held like cardboard where they are. Bluehot it is queer fuel to make the moon move. Agesias said: 'Nero was an artist because he murdered his mother Sensibility (subliminal) is of more importance than moral obligation (prandial).' But Agesias paints cottages in watercolours and fears his own mother. Barbarieus said: 'I am passionately in love with Gito who spurns me for Praxinoê' But until he saw them together he was merely disturbed by Gito's eyelashes. Galônus said: 'The subsequent shrivelling of an orchid doesn't alter the value of its beauty.' Decanus said: 'Joy in nothing. Either dies joy or what produced it.' But Galônus is attractive to women, Decanus obese, poor, obtuse. Epinondas said: 'I have been a liar, now no longer so.' Zeuxias said: 'What I have always been, I shall remain, a fool." Is it better to be self-deceived or lazy? Epator was drunk for two days: Theodorus traced his disease to college, Iphogenês saw God and died, And so down the Alphabet, ate, and the Persian, With variegated gutterals and sibilants, the Gaelic with dipthongs and tripthongs, Choctaw with three different clicks Each letter is somebody But the Crab is nobody Nobody Nobody A ganglion of neurotic imitations Composed of each letter in turn Jointed by conflicts he does not want A word that never existed with a sense nobody can understand. Suffering for the sins his father refuse to commit He sits and thinks about the twiddling toes of Gunerita A boy-girl or girl-boy of an average pulchritude Haunted by phantoms of his female self Whom he has never seen but composed himself, thus: Breasts of Augustina brains of Beatrice Arms of Capucine on the motherliness of Dorothea Eyes of Evelyn in the brow of Francesca Fragrance of Gretchen with the understanding of Helen This he desires, but despises: Bhah! Always sideways, crabs walk. Either he is not fit for this world Or this world not fit for him. But which? After all this pain of development is there neither interval nor reward? They lured him with promises, Now it has all slipped sideways What is the good, I ask you, of going into a melting-pot If fated to melt again after getting out of it? The answers are: He is not out of it Determined to budge not from yon slippery rock Not a yard, no, not an inch, no, nor a barleycorn's breadth For chance is not blind but unimpedable And we call it blind because Since we frustrate it only by chance We prefer to shut our own eyes. The crab however crawls on. He must therefore be a crab subnormal. One day, one of his foreclaws, assembled as usual by many men, Being longer than the other, turns and pinches his tentacles With the other he pinches the persons that assembled the long one Next day the short one, equally alien, is the longer And the process is reversed. In mass production one hand never knows The evil the other is inspiring it to do This is a heretic even to the faiths he fails to believe So worthless, awkward, unintelligible, The crab crawls on. He has sufferd because he was ugly Let him be cruel now that he is attractive Caring not whether he fructifies cruelty or is merely hard on self. We trap our goldfinch trapping out souls therewinged Sacrifice our mad gods to the madder gods: We hymn the two sons of Leda and Zeus Aegis-bearer We don't. We drink and drivel. My poor Catullus, do stop being such a fool. Admit that lost which as you watch is gone. O, once the days shone very bright for you, when where that girl you loved so (as no other will be) called, you came and came. And then and there were odd things done and many which you wanted and she didn't not want. Yes indeed the days shone very bright for you. But now she doesn't want it. Don't you either, booby. Don't keep chasing her. Don't live in misery, carry on, be firm, be hardened. Goodbye, girl: Catullus is quite hardened, doesn't want you, doesn't ask, if you're not keen—though sorry you'll be to be not asked. Yes, poor sinner . . . what is left in life for you? Who'll now go with you? Who'll be attracted? Whom'll you love now? Whom say you belong to? Whom'll you now kiss? Whose lips'll you nibble? —Now you, Catullus! you've decided to be hardened. How can I be hardened when the whole world is fluid? O Aphroditê Pandêmos, your badgers rolling in the moonlit corn Corn blue-bloom-covered carpeting the wind Wind humming like distant rooks Distant rooks busy like factory whirring metal Whirring metallic starlings bizarre like cogwheels missing teeth These last grinning like the backs of old motor cars Old motor cars smelling of tragomaschality Tragomaschality denoting the triumph of self over civilization Civilization being relative our to Greek Greek to Persian Persian to Chinese Chinese politely making borborygms to show satisfaction Satisfaction a matter of capacity Capacity not significance: otherwise with an epigram Epigrams—poems with a strabismus Strabismus being as common spiritually as optically the moon The moon tramping regular steps like a policeman past the houses of the Zodiac And the Zodiac itself, whirling and flaming sideways