In the medlar, in the sorb-apple.

  Wineskins of brown morbidity,

  Autumnal excrementa;

  What is it that reminds us of white gods?

  Gods nude as blanched nut-kernels.

  Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant

  As if with sweat,

  And drenched with mystery.

  Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.

  I say, wonderful are the hellish experiences

  Orphic, delicate

  Dionysos of the Underworld.

  A kiss, and a vivid spasm of farewell, a moment’s orgasm

  of rupture.

  Then along the damp road alone, till the next turning.

  And there, a new partner, a new parting, a new unfusing

  into twain,

  A new gasp of further isolation,

  A new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying, frost-cold

  leaves.

  Going down the strange lanes of hell, more and more

  intensely alone,

  The fibres of the heart parting one after the other

  And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more vividly

  embodied

  Like a flame blown whiter and whiter

  In a deeper and deeper darkness

  Ever more exquisite, distilled in separation.

  So, in the strange retorts of medlars and sorb-apples

  The distilled essence of hell.

  The exquisite odour of leave-taking.

  Jamque vale!

  Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of hell.

  Each soul departing with its own isolation,

  Strangest of all strange companions,

  And best.

  Medlars, sorb-apples

  More than sweet

  Flux of autumn

  Sucked out of your empty bladders

  And sipped down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala

  So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add its

  music to yours,

  Orphic farewell, and farewell, and farewell

  And the ego sum of Dionysos

  The sono io of perfect drunkenness

  Intoxication of final loneliness.

  San Gervasio.

  FIGS

  THE proper way to eat a fig, in society,

  Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,

  And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist, honied,

  heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.

  Then you throw away the skin

  Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,

  After you have taken off the blossom with your lips.

  But the vulgar way

  Is just to put your mouth to the crack, and take out the

  flesh in one bite.

  Every fruit has its secret.

  The fig is a very secretive fruit.

  As you see it standing growing, you feel at once it is symbolic:

  And it seems male.

  But when you come to know it better, you agree with the

  Romans, it is female.

  The Italians vulgarly say, it stands for the female part; the

  fig-fruit:

  The fissure, the yoni,

  The wonderful moist conductivity towards the centre.

  Involved,

  Inturned,

  The flowering all inward and womb-fibrilled;

  And but one orifice.

  The fig, the horse-shoe, the squash-blossom.

  Symbols.

  There was a flower that flowered inward, womb-ward;

  Now there is a fruit like a ripe womb.

  It was always a secret.

  That’s how it should be, the female should always be

  secret.

  There never was any standing aloft and unfolded on a

  bough

  Like other flowers, in a revelation of petals;

  Silver-pink peach, venetian green glass of medlars and sorb —

  apples,

  Shallow wine-cups on short, bulging stems

  Openly pledging heaven:

  Here’s to the thorn in the flower! Here is to Utterance!

  The brave, adventurous rosaceae.

  Folded upon itself, and secret unutterable,

  And milky-sapped, sap that curdles milk and makes ricotta,

  Sap that smells strange on your fingers, that even goats won’t

  taste it;

  Folded upon itself, enclosed like any Mohammedan woman.

  Its nakedness all within-walls, its flowering forever unseen.

  One small way of access only, and this close-curtained from

  the light;

  Fig, fruit of the female mystery, covert and inward,

  Mediterranean fruit, with your covert nakedness,

  Where everything happens invisible, flowering and fertilisa —

  tion, and fruiting

  In the inwardness of your you, that eye will never see

  Till it’s finished, and you’re over-ripe, and you burst to give

  up your ghost.

  Till the drop of ripeness exudes,

  And the year is over.

  And then the fig has kept her secret long enough.

  So it explodes, and you see through the fissure the scarlet.

  And the fig is finished, the year is over.

  That’s how the fig dies, showing her crimson through the

  purple slit

  Like a wound, the exposure of her secret, on the open day.

  Like a prostitute, the bursten fig, making a show of her

  secret.

  That’s how women die too.

  The year is fallen over-ripe.

  The year of our women.

  The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

  The secret is laid bare.

  And rottenness soon sets in.

  The year of our women is fallen over-ripe.

  When Eve once knew in her mind that she was naked

  She quickly sewed fig-leaves, and sewed the same for the

  man.

  She’d been naked all her days before,

  But till then, till that apple of knowledge, she hadn’t had

  the fact on her mind.

  She got the fact on her mind, and (quickly sewed fig-leaves.

  And women have been sewing ever since.

  But now they stitch to adorn the bursten fig, not to cover it.

  They have their nakedness more than ever on their mind,

  And they won’t let us forget it.

  Now, the secret

  Becomes an affirmation through moist, scarlet lips

  That laugh at the Lord’s indignation.

  What then, good Lord! cry the women.

  We have kept our secret long enough.

  We are a ripe fig.

  Let us burst into affirmation.

  They forget, ripe figs won’t keep.

  Ripe figs won’t keep.

  Honey-white figs of the north, black figs with scarlet inside,

  of the south.

  Ripe figs won’t keep, won’t keep in any clime.

  What then, when women the world over have all bursten into

  affirmation?

  And bursten figs won’t keep?

  San Gervasio.

  GRAPES

  SO many fruits come from roses

  From the rose of all roses

  From the unfolded rose

  Rose of all the world.

  Admit that apples and strawberries and peaches and pears

  and blackberries

  Are all Rosaceae,

  Issue of the explicit rose,

  The open-countenanced, skyward-smiling rose.

  What then of the vine?

  Oh, what of the tendrilled vine?

  Ours is the universe of the unfolded rose,

  The explicit,

  The candid revelation.

  But long ago, oh, long ago

  Before the rose began to simper supreme,

  Before the rose of all roses, rose of all the world, was even

  in bud,

  Before the glaciers were gathered up in a bunch out of the

  unsettled seas and winds,

  Or else before they had been let down again, in Noah’s flood,

  There was another world, a dusky, flowerless, tendrilled

  world

  And creatures webbed and marshy,

  And on the margin, men soft-footed and pristine,

  Still, and sensitive, and active,

  Audile, tactile sensitiveness as of a tendril which orientates

  and reaches out,

  Reaching out and grasping by an instinct more delicate than

  the moon’s as she feels for the tides.

  Of which world, the vine was the invisible rose,

  Before petals spread, before colour made its disturbance,

  before eyes saw too much.

  In a green, muddy, web-foot, unutterably songless world

  The vine was rose of all roses.

  There were no poppies or carnations,

  Hardly a greenish lily, watery faint.

  Green, dim, invisible flourishing of vines

  Royally gesticulate.

  Look now even now, how it keeps its power of invisibility!

  Look how black, how blue-black, how globed in Egyptian

  darkness

  Dropping among his leaves, hangs the dark grape!

  See him there, the swart, so palpably invisible:

  Whom shall we ask about him?

  The negro might know a little.

  When the vine was rose, Gods were dark-skinned.

  Bacchus is a dream’s dream.

  Once God was all negroid, as now he is fair.

  But it’s so long ago, the ancient Bushman has forgotten more

  utterly than we, who have never known.

  For we are on the brink of re-remembrance.

  Which, I suppose, is why America has gone dry.

  Our pale day is sinking into twilight,

  And if we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us

  Out of the imminent night.

  Nay, we find ourselves crossing the fern-scented frontiers

  Of the world before the floods, where man was dark and evasive

  And the tiny vine-flower rose of all roses, perfumed,

  And all in naked communion communicating as now our

  clothed vision can never communicate.

  Vistas, down dark avenues

  As we sip the wine.

  The grape is swart, the avenues dusky and tendrilled, subtly

  prehensile.

  But we, as we start awake, clutch at our vistas democratic,

  boulevards, tram-cars, policemen.

  Give us our own back

  Let us go to the soda-fountain, to get sober.

  Soberness, sobriety.

  It is like the agonised perverseness of a child heavy with

  sleep, yet fighting, fighting to keep awake;

  Soberness, sobriety, with heavy eyes propped open.

  Dusky are the avenues of wine,

  And we must cross the frontiers, though we will not,

  Of the lost, fern-scented world:

  Take the fern-seed on our lips,

  Close the eyes, and go

  Down the tendrilled avenues of wine and the otherworld.

  San Gervasio.

  THE REVOLUTIONARY

  LOOK at them standing there in authority

  The pale-faces,

  As if it could have any effect any more.

  Pale-face authority,

  Caryatids,

  Pillars of white bronze standing rigid, lest the skies fall.

  What a job they’ve got to keep it up.

  Their poor, idealist foreheads naked capitals

  To the entablature of clouded heaven.

  When the skies are going to fall, fall they will

  In a great chute and rush of debacle downwards.

  Oh and I wish the high and super-gothic heavens would

  come down now,

  The heavens above, that we yearn to and aspire to.

  I do not yearn, nor aspire, for I am a blind Samson.

  And what is daylight to me that I should look skyward?

  Only I grope among you, pale-faces, caryatids, as among a

  forest of pillars that hold up the dome of high ideal

  heaven

  Which is my prison,

  And all these human pillars of loftiness, going stiff, metallic —

  stunned with the weight of their responsibility

  I stumble against them.

  Stumbling-blocks, painful ones.

  To keep on holding up this ideal civilisation

  Must be excruciating: unless you stiffen into metal,

  when it is easier to stand stock rigid than to move.

  This is why I tug at them, individually, with my arm

  round their waist

  The human pillars.

  They are not stronger than I am, blind Samson.

  The house sways.

  I shall be so glad when it comes down.

  I am so tired of the limitations of their Infinite.

  I am so sick of the pretensions of the Spirit.

  I am so weary of pale-face importance.

  Am I not blind, at the round-turning mill?

  Then why should I fear their pale faces?

  Or love the effulgence of their holy light,

  The sun of their righteousness?

  To me, all faces are dark,

  All lips are dusky and valved.

  Save your lips, O pale-faces,

  Which are slips of metal,

  Like slits in an automatic-machine, you columns of give —

  and-take.

  To me, the earth rolls ponderously, superbly

  Coming my way without forethought or afterthought.

  To me, men’s footfalls fall with a dull, soft rumble,

  ominous and lovely,

  Coming my way.

  But not your foot-falls, pale-faces,

  They are a clicketing of bits of disjointed metal

  Working in motion.

  To me, men are palpable, invisible nearnesses in the dark

  Sending out magnetic vibrations of warning, pitch-dark throbs

  of invitation.

  But you, pale-faces,

  You are painful, harsh-surfaced pillars that give off nothing

  except rigidity,

  And I jut against you if I try to move, for you are every —

  where, and I am blind,

  Sightless among all your visuality,

  You staring caryatids.

  See if I don’t bring you down, and all your high opinion

  And all your ponderous roofed-in erection of right and wrong

  Your particular heavens,

  With a smash.

  See if your skies aren’t falling!

  And my head, at least, is thick enough to stand it, the smash.

  See if I don’t move under a dark and nude, vast heaven

  When your world is in ruins, under your fallen skies.

  Caryatids, pale-faces.

  See if I am not Lord of the dark and moving hosts

  Before I die.

  Florence.

  THE EVENING LAND

  OH America

  The sun sets in you.

  Are you the grave of our day?

  Shall I come to you, the open tomb of my race?

  I would come, if I felt my hour had struck.

  I would rather you came to me.

  For that matter

  Mahomet never went to any mountain

  Save it had first approached him and cajoled his soul.

  You have cajoled the souls of millions of us

  America,

  Why won’t you cajole my soul?

  I wish you would.

  I confess I am afraid of you.

  The catastrophe of your exaggerate love,

  You who never find yourself in love

  But only lose yourself further, decomposing.

  You who never recover from out of the orgasm of loving

  Your pristine, isolate integrity, lost aeons ago.

  Your singleness within the universe.

  You who in loving break down

  And break further and further down

  Your bounds of isolation,

  But who never rise, resurrected, from this grave of mingling,

  In a new proud singleness, America.

  Your more-than-European idealism,

  Like a be-aureoled bleached skeleton hovering

  Its cage-ribs in the social heaven, beneficent.

  And then your single resurrection

  Into machine-uprisen perfect man.

  Even the winged skeleton of your bleached ideal

  Is not so frightening as that clean smooth

  Automaton of your uprisen self,

  Machine American.

  Do you wonder that I am afraid to come

  And answer the first machine-cut question from the lips of

  your iron men?

  Put the first cents into metallic fingers of your officers

  And sit beside the steel-straight arms of your fair women

  American?

  This may be a withering tree, this Europe,

  But here, even a customs-official is still vulnerable.

  I am so terrified, America,

  Of the iron click of your human contact.

  And after this

  The winding-sheet of your self-less ideal love.

  Boundless love

  Like a poison gas.

  Does no one realise that love should be intense, individual,

  Not boundless.

 

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