IOURGEOIS POET
411
Sirens with black lips and identical faces. Fly-boys in the orient;
regulation uniforms.
Tillie and Mack in the Kinsey Collection. In New Guinea the
Japanese propaganda drawings dropped from a Zero: Yank,
this
is what civilian is doing to your wife back home. (Showing
what.) Colors of Utamaro.
Frank Merriwell at Yale. Tom the fun-loving Rover. Tom Swift and
his electric grandmother (joke). Alger, Henty, S. S. Van Dine.
"Patterns" by Amy Lowell. And in Virginia,
Southern Prose and
Poetry.
Books
for the sake of shelves. Encyclopedia of railroad engineering,
sixty-seven volumes, fold-out plates of boilers, piston
a~embly.
The Waverley novels, dark tomes maroon and brown to handle
on a rainy day. Balzac complete, unread. The Harvard Classics,
mean, unprovocative,
Veritas
stamped on the backbone.
*
*
*
Poem, is it de rigueur to descend to hell? Will you lose your pedigree?
How business-like is convention. What slag the prodigies of the
epic mind. How little human the heroes and angels.
Tell me again what tragedy is. I can never remember.
Because the king is a fool and the lady a bitch; because a woman
butchers her children to spite her husband; or a man makes
love to his mother by mistake-shall I descend to hell?
Because the dollar tips the scales; or certain languages are dead; the
nobility bankrupt; because the government has awarded you
teeth-shall I descend to hell?
I descend and find the usual evidence. And Paul made love to
Frances and they burn forever.
Where are you taking me, Alighieri? I have a different religion.
I go with Geoffrey to the house of April. Gottfried of Strass–
burg, give us the gutsy Tristan.
Children play on the gorgeous baldaquin, climbing the marble vines
while the mothers kneel, eating the Body. The priest moves
rapidly from mouth to mouth. Black and white, the barbaric
tower rears over history. It's no playground.
The bloodshot Germans enter the Forum in shorts. Proudly they
gaze on the fine destruction.
