THE INTELLECTUAL
What should the wars do with these jigging fools?
The man behind the book may not be man,
His
own man or the book's or yet the time's,
But still
be
whole, deciding what he can
In praise of politics or German rimes;
But the intellectual lights a cigarette
And offers it lit to the lady, whose odd smile
Is the merest hyphen-lest he should forget
What he has been resuming
all
the while.
He talks to overhear, she to withdraw
To some interior femine fireside
Where the back arches, beauty puts forth a paw
Like a black puma stretching in velvet pride,
Making him think of cats, a stray of which
Some days sets up a howling in
his
brain,
Pure interference such as this neat bitch
~eems
to create from listening disdain.
But talk is all the value, the release,
Talk is the very fillip of an act,
The frame and subject of the masterpiece
Under whose film of age the face is cracked.
His own forehead glows like expensive wood,
But back of
it
the mind is disengaged,
Self-sealing clock recording bad and good
At constant temperature, intact, unaged.
43
