BOURGEOIS POET
413
Did you know the damasked walls gave way so rottenly, the gilted
wood so mealy with fatigue?
Did you see the estates divided and plowed and the monstrous houses
opened to view for your sad Sundays?
Aren't you the popular song of God in the formstone churches, you
of ideals and virtues, responsible, lovable, disciplined, free?
Isn't it you you mutter against, with your fuzzed haircut in your
wife's bosom?
Citizen, is your glorious revolution over and done with?
And you, my country, how does it feel to be They?
What are those objects on which our eyes are frozen?
Flag on the candy-factory grammar school;
Eternal light hung from a silver chain above the Ark in the synagogue;
Samurai sword in the French admiral's possession (to be given to a
poet on a state occasion) ;
Rectilinear facade of Greek; font of the Hebrew; spittle of the
christer contorting on the bare ground;
Finder of inscapes; critique of frameless abstractions; voyeurs of
myth;
Hypnotised lovers; napoleonic captains of copper mines; editors
of quack compendia of knowledge;
All worshipers, all fanatics, all absorbed in the object which is really
you,
You who descry the streamings of life as other and beyond;
You strapped to your muscles (is the culture-gag in your teeth?);
Altars, uniforms of every description, detritus of battles, delirium of
ethics, codes of the good, new wars, new medals, new master–
pieces forged for the market;
Heavy stone of your overturned lives, what crawling dreams!
What is it you are trying to become, men of my species?
Homo normalis, blind as a bat, that music you hear is coming from
you.
Where did you study the physics of the epic? What is this eternal
conspiracy of distraction? Why are the sick the most articulate?
Poetry weaving at the bar, go home. Somebody call a cab.
Who are these that compound the mystery? Tell me about the Dewey
Decimal System.
