42
PARTISAN REVIEW
THOMAS THE CYNIC
Then I must say good-by. In any case you
will
not miss very
much
if
I do not give you my comments on the technique of Fascist
propaganda.
As
a matter of fact, I have not very much to say about
it, the Germans in particular having dealt with it liberally in their
writings, as of a thing which has no secrets.
The Beggars: Place Edmond Rost:and
No longer stiff as trees,
their limbs like branches in the winter posture,
nor gray as walls, the ravaged supplicants
open and stir. Some, like monstrous flowers,
lift up their faces, blinded by so much light
from roof and street thrown back upon them; others, with march of
turtles
\
and eyes of statuary, drift among velvet-breasted pigeonS.
- Through all the winter months, alone on comers
or as they crept from rain to rain
they had the life-like lifeless look of tailors' figures,
mechanical and waxen.
As
I went past I met their glance
and pictured that strange life which moves by clockwork,
marked by no anger, no surprise, no burst of laughter
but always grooved more deeply in exhaustion.-
No longer fixed, like stones
past which the honest citizen pursues his course,
nor bent as mandrake, like rich wounds they blossom.
Lost in great sculptural folds of rotten cloth
one sang, sang out with the crazy abandon of a bird
on summer's topmost branch-while all the others
mistrust the season's golden promise.
The warmth in which they shudder is too new,
winter, the shadowy forest grown their world,
too close behind them.
Tomorrow, when the sun beats down their fear,
drunken as birds, perhaps, and senseless with relief,
they will wander at random in all directions
or, in some wedge of light, sleep off the season
whose locked horizons outstretched past and future.
CLARK
MILLS
