‘Talking of poems,’ it said, and it belonged to a dark, cadaverous, over-distinguished nostril-flaring man with a long blue jaw and chronic eyestrain, ‘reminds me of a poem.’
‘I wonder why,’ said Thirst irritably, for he had been on the brink of expansion.
The man with eyestrain took no notice of the remark.
‘The poem which I am reminded of is one which I wrote myself.’
A bald man knitted his brows; the pontifical gentleman lit a cigar, his face as expressionless as ever; and a lady, the lobes of whose ears had been ruined by the weight of two gigantic sapphires, half opened her mouth with an inane smirk of anticipation.
The dark man with eyestrain folded his hands before him.
‘It didn’t come off,’ he said, ‘– although it had something –’ (he twisted his lips). ‘Sixty-four stanzas in fact.’ (He raised his eyes) ‘– Yes, yes – it was very, very long and ambitious – but it didn’t come off. And why …?’
He paused, not because he wanted any suggestions, but in order to take a deep, meditative breath.
‘I will tell you why, my friends. It didn’t come off because you see, it was verse all the time.’
‘Blank verse?’ inquired the lady, whose head was bent forward by the weight of the sapphires. She was eager to be helpful. ‘Was it blank verse?’
‘It went like this,’ said the dark man, unclasping his hands before him and clasping them behind him, and at the same time placing the heel of his left shoe immediately in front of the toe of his right shoe so that the two feet formed a single and unbroken line of leather. ‘It went like this.’ He lifted his head. ‘But do not forget it is not Poetry – except perhaps for three singing lines at the outside.’
‘Well, for the love of Parnassus – let’s have it,’ broke in the petulant voice of Mr Thirst who, finding his thunder stolen, was no longer interested in good manners.
‘A-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ mused the man with the long blue jaw, who seemed to consider other people’s time and patience as inexhaustible commodities like air, or water, ‘a-l-t-h-o-u-g-h,’ (he lingered over the word like a nurse over a sick child), ‘there were those who said the whole thing sang; who hailed it as the purest poetry of our generation – “incandescent stuff” as one gentleman put it – but there you are – there you are – how is one to tell?’
‘Ah,’ whispered a voice of curds and whey. And a man with gold teeth turned his eyes to the lady with the sapphires, and they exchanged the arch expression of those who find themselves, however unworthily, to be witnesses at an historic moment.
‘Quiet please,’ said the poet. ‘And listen carefully.’
A mule at prayer! Ignore him: turn to me
Until the gold contraption of our love
Rattles its seven biscuit boxes, and the sea
Withdraws its combers from the rhubarb-grove.
This is no place for maudlin-headed fays
To smirk behind their mushrooms! ’t is a shore
For gaping daemons: it is such a place,
As I, my love, have long been looking for.
Here, where the rhubarb-grove into the wave
Throws down its rueful image, we can fly
Our kites of love, above the sandy grave
Of those long lost in ambiguity.
For love is ripest in a rhubarb-grove
Where weird reflections glimmer through the dawn:
O vivid essence vegetably wove
Of hues that die, the moment they are born.
Lost in the venal void our dreams deflate
By easy stages through green atmosphere:
Imagination’s bright balloon is late,
Like the blue whale, in coming up for air.
It is not known what genus of the wild
Black plums of thought best wrinkle, twitch and flow
Into sweet wisdom’s prune – for in the mild
Orchards of love there is no need to know.
What use to cry for Capricorn? it sails
Across the heart’s red atlas: it is found
Only within the ribs, where all the tails
The tempest has are whisking it around.
No time for tears: it is enough, today,
