POEMS
Richard Howard
POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE BY
ISADORA DUNCAN
The third time I resisted D'Annunzio
was years after the War,
and to dilapidations in My Life
every limb testifies
since the escapes (elementary enough)
of those Houdini days!
I find it pitiful to contemplate
our mutual conceit
on those absurd occasions, now we know
all that has intervened.
Yet what
do
we know, really? I say "all"
as if I had been schooled
in catastrophe, when Triumph was my mode.
His too, apparently.. .
Raising his eyelids as though he were
removing his trousers,
the poet stood in my Paris
loge d'artiste,
towering under me,
the
chaise-longue
crammed with his chrysanthemums
-"lion blooms," he called them,
"Ecco i leoni"-and
licked his lips as if
they were someone else's.
That was my first evasion: "They smell-" I said,
"they smell like drowned sailors."
Whereupon virtue was intact: Italians are
grimly conventional-
so much easier to shock than to persuade.
The next time, my escape
