Read Ebook: Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments by Bynner Witter Ficke Arthur Davison

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Ebook has 119 lines and 7403 words, and 3 pages

A strap in a street-car, A sea-fan on the sand, A beer on a bar . . . Were your hand

The pillar of a porch, The tapering of an egg, The pine of a torch . . . Were your leg.--

Sun on the Hellespont, White swimmers in the bowl Of the baptismal font Are your soul.

SO we came back again After some years-- Just revisiting The scenes of our sin. Nothing is there but the garden; And we had expected That we would be there.

I heard a wind blowing Down the sky. It came with heavy auguries And passed. There was a soothsayer once in Rome Who on a white altar Inspected the purple entrails of victims.

GIVER of bribes in the brightness of morning, Cities have wavered and rocked and gone down . . . But the lamps of the altars hang round you, adorning The niche of your neck and the drift of your gown.

O bribe-giver, marked with purple metal-- Cut in your naked contentment there shows On the curve of your breast one carven petal From heaven's impenetrable rose!

You open the window to myriad windows, The high triangular door of the world . . . Till the walls and the roofs and the curious keystone, The carven rose with its petals uncurled,

Are swayed in the swathe of the uppermost ether, Where stars are the columns upholding a dome, And the edifice rolls on a corner of ocean, Lifts on a wave, poises on foam . . .

We stand on the rose, we are images golden, We move interchanging, attaining one crest: One chin and one mouth and one nose and one forehead, One mouth and one chin and one neck and one breast . . .

I pull you apart from me, struggle to bind you, I free you, I rend you in seven great rays . . . And we cling to them all . . . but we lose them, and slowly-- We slip with the rainbow down the blue bays.

UPSTAIRS there lies a sodden thing Sleeping. Soon it will come down And drink coffee. I shall have to smile at it across the table. How can I? For I know that at this moment It sleeps without a sign of life; it is as good as dead. I will not consort with reformed corpses, I the life-lover, I the abundant. I have known living only; I will not acknowledge kinship with death. White graves or black, linen or porphyry, Are all one to me. And yet, on the Lybian plains Where dust is blown, A king once Built of baked clay and bulls of bronze A tomb that makes me waver.

I ONLY know that you are given me For my delight. No other angle finishes my soul But you, you white.

I know that I am given you, Black whirl to white, To lift the seven colors up . . . Focus of light!

REITERATION! . . .

The seconds bob by, So many, so many, Each ugly in its own way As raw meats are all ugly. Why do we feed on the dead? Or would at least it were with cries and lust Of slaying our human food Beneath a cannibal sun! But these old corpses of alien creatures! . . . I loathe them! And too many heads go by the window, All alien-- Filers of saws, doubtless, Or lechers Or Sabbath-keepers. Morality comes from God. He was busy. He forgot to make beauty. Why does he not call back into their hen-house This ugly straggling flock of seconds That trail by With pin-feathers showing?

WHY ask it of me?--the impossible!-- Shall I pick up the lightning in my hand? Have I not given homages too well For words to understand?--

Words take you from me, bring you back again, Dance in our presence, cover your proud face With the incredible counterpane, Break our embrace . . .

No, not to you Your wish, But to some kangaroo Or cuttle-fish

Or octopus or eagle or tarantula Or elephant or dove Or some peninsula Let me speak love--

Or call some battle or some temple-bell Or many-curving pine Or some cool truth-containing well Or thin cathedral--mine!

IF I should enter to his chamber And suddenly touch him, Would he fade to a thin mist, Or glow into a fire-ball, Or burst like a punctured light-globe? It is impossible that he would merely yawn and rub And say--"What is it?"

MAN-THUNDER, woman-lightning, Rumble, gleam; Refusal, Scream.

Needles and pins of pain All pointed the same way; Parellel lines of pain When the lips are gray And know not what they say: Rain, Rain.

But after the whirl of fright And great shouts and flashes, The pounding clashes And deep slashes, After the scattered ashes

Of the night, Heaven's height Abashes With a gleam through unknown lashes Of delicious points of light.

THE black bark of a dog Made patterns against the night. And little leaves flute-noted across the moon.

I seemed to feel your soft looks Steal across that quiet evening room Where once our souls spoke, long ago.

For that was of a vastness; And this night is of a vastness . . .

There was a dog-bark then-- It was the sound Of my rebellious and incredulous heart Its patterns twined about the stars And drew them down And devoured them.

AN angel, bringing incense, prays Forever in that tree . . . I go blind still when the locust sways Those honey-domes for me.

All the fragrances of dew, O angel, are there, The myrrhic rapture of young hair, The lips of lust; And all the stenches of dust, Even the palm and the fingers of a hand burnt bare With a curling sweet-smelling crust, And the bitter staleness of old hair, Powder on a withering bust . . .

The moon came through the window to our bed. And the shadows of the locust-tree On your white sweet body made of me, Of my lips, a drunken bee. . . . O tree-like Spring, O blossoming days, I, who some day shall be dead, Shall have ever a lover to sway with me. For when my face decays And the earth moulds in my nostrils, shall there not be The breath therein of a locust-tree, The seed, the shoot of a locust-tree, The honey-domes of a locust-tree, Till lovers go blind and sway with me?--

O tree-like Spring, O blossomy days, To sway as long as the locust sways!

BESIDE the brink of dream I had put out my willow-roots and leaves As by a stream Too narrow for the invading greaves Of Rome in her trireme . . . Then you came--like a scream Of beeves.

OH my little house of glass! How carefully I have planted shrubbery To plume before your transparency. Light is too amorous of you, Transfusing through and through Your panes with an effulgence never new. Sometimes I am terribly tempted To throw the stones myself.

THEY enter with long trailing of shadowy cloth, And each with one hand praying in the air, And the softness of their garments is the grayness of a moth-- The lost and broken night-moth of despair.

And they keep a wounded distance With following bare feet, A distance Isadoran-- And the dark moons beat Their drums.

More desolate than they are Isadora stands, The blaze of the sun on her grief; The stars of a willow are in both her hands, And her heart is the shape of a leaf.

And they come to her for comfort And her black-thrown hair Is a harp of consolation Singing anthems in the air.

With the dark she wrestles, daring alone, Though their young arms would aid; Her body wreathes and brightens, never thrown, Unvanquished, unafraid . . .

Till light comes leaping On little children's feet, Comes leaping Isadoran-- And the white stars beat Their drums.

HER soul was freckled Like the bald head Of a jaundiced Jewish banker. Her fair and featurous face Writhed like An albino boa-constrictor. She thought she resembled the Mona Lisa. This demonstrates the futility of thinking.

IF I were only dafter I might be making hymns To the liquor of your laughter And the lacquer of your limbs.

But you turn across the table A telescope of eyes. And it lights a Russian sable Running circles in the skies. . . .

Till I go running after, Obeying all your whims-- For the liquor of your laughter And the lacquer of your limbs.

WHEN frogs' legs on a plate are brought to me As though I were divinity in France, I feel as God would feel were He to see Imperial Russians dance.

These people's thoughts and gestures and concerns Move like a Russian ballet made of eggs; A bright-smirched canvas heaven heaves and burns Above their arms and legs.

Society hops this way and that, well-taught; But while I watch, in cloudy state, I feel as God would feel if he were brought Frogs' legs on a plate.

I DO not know very much, But I know this-- That the storms of contempt that sweep over us, Ready to blast any edifice before then Rise from the fathomless maelstrom Of contempt for ourselves. If there be a god, May he preserve me From striking with these lightnings Those whom I love.

Saying which, Zarathustra strolled on Down Fifth Avenue.

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