POEMS AND PROSE

TWILIGHT PUSHES DOWN YOUR EYES

Twilight pushes down your eyes
With shimmering, pregnant fingers
That leave you covered with still-born touch.
With little whips of dead words
Silence cuts your lips to a keener red.
Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death,
And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse.
Night will soon whisk away this room
But you are already invisible.

Maxwell Bodenheim

This is perhaps not Bodenheim's most cheerful poem, but it does illustrate his inventive mind.

TURMOIL IN A MORGUE

Negro,
Chinaman,
White servant-girl,
Russian woman,
Are learning how to be dead,
Aided by the impersonal boredom
Of a morgue at evening.
The morgue divides its whole
Of dead men's contacts into four
Parts, and places one in each
Of these four bodies waiting for the carts.
The frankness of their decay
Breaks into contradictory symbols
And sits erect upon the wooden tables,
Thus cancelling the validity of time.
In a voice as passive as slime
The negro speaks.
"Killed a woman: ripped her skin.
Saw her heart floating in a tumbler of gin.
Had to drink her heart because it wouldn't leave the gin.
Because I wanted to reach all of her
They ripped my flesh.
They wanted to reach all of me
And their excuse was better than mine."
Cowed baby painted black,
The negro sits upon fundamentals
And troubles them a little with his hands.
The beautiful insanity
Of his eyes rebukes
The common void of his face.
Then the Chinaman speaks
In a voice whose tones are brass
From which emotion has been extracted.
"Loved a woman: she was white.
Her man blew my brains out in the night.
Hatred is afraid of color.
Color is the holiday
Given to moods of understanding:
Hatred does not understand.
When stillness ends the fever of ideas
Hatred will be a scarcely remembered spark."
Manikin at peace
With the matchless deceit of a planet,
The Chinaman fashions his placid immensity.
The Chinaman chides his insignificance
With a more impressive rapture
Than that of western midgets.
His rapture provides an excellent light
For the silhouette of the negro's curse.
Then the white servant-girl
Speaks in a voice whose syllables
Fall like dripping flower-juice and offal,
Both producing a similar sound.
"I made a neat rug for a man.
He cleaned his feet on me and I liked
The tired, scheming way in which he did it.
When he finished he decided
That he needed a smoother texture,
And found another lady.
I killed myself because I couldn't rub out
The cunning marks that he left behind."
Impulsive doll made of rubbish
On which a spark descended and ended,
The white servant-girl, without question or answer,
Accepts the jest of a universe.
Then the Russian woman
Speaks in a voice that is heat
Ill-at-ease upon its couch of sound.
"I married a man because
His lips tormented my melancholy
And made it long to be meek
And because, when he walked to his office each morning,
He thought himself a kindled devil
Enduring the smaller figures around him.
He abandoned me for German intrigue
And I chased him in other men,
Never quite designing him.
Death, a better megalomaniac,
Relieved me of the pursuit."
Symbol of earth delighted
With the vibration of its nerves,
The Russian woman sunders life
Into amusing deities of emotion
And bestows a hurried worship.
Then the morgue, attended by a whim,
Slays the intonations of their trance
And slips these people back to life.
The air is cut by transformation.
The white servant-girl retreats to a corner
With a shriek, while the negro advances,
And the Russian woman
Nervously objects to the Chinaman's question.
The morgue, weary housewife for speechless decay,
Spends its helplessness in gay revenge:
Revenge of earth upon four manikins
Who straightened up on wooden tables
And betrayed her.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Orrick Johns? Who was this man that Bodenheim addressed his poem to?

I am having difficulty in understanding parts of this poem, particularly the first two lines. Where is "this stern place"? I thought at first a cemetery, but perhaps not. Do you have any suggestions?

TO ORRICK JOHNS

The tread-mill roar that ever tramps between
The smirched geometries of this stern place,
Sweeps vainly on your drowsily reckless face
Lost in a swirl of raped loves barely seen.
Sometimes your keenly pagan lips are raised
By thoughts too tense to shape themselves in speech:
Still, wounded thoughts that silently beseech
Your life to make them impotent and dazed.

O tangled and half-strangled child, you shrink
For ever from yourself, and wear a pose
Of nimble and impenetrable pride.
Yet sometimes, wavering on the sudden brink
Of jaded bitterness, you drop your clothes
And weave a prayer into your naked stride.

Maxwell Bodenheim

In my search for information about Orrick Johns, I came across several of his poems and I thought it might be of interest to include one here. It is much simpler in thought and construction than Bodenheim's work.

THE SEA-LANDS

Would I were on the sea-lands,
Where winds know how to sting;
And in the rocks at midnight
The lost long murmurs sing.

Would I were with my first love
To hear the rush and roar
Of spume below the doorstep
And winds upon the door.

My first love was a fair girl
With ways forever new;
And hair a sunlight yellow,
And eyes a morning blue.

The roses, have they tarried
Or are they dun and frayed?
If we had stayed together,
Would love, indeed, have stayed?

Ah, years are filled with learning,
And days are leaves of change!
And I have met so many
I knew … and found them strange.

But on the sea-lands tumbled
By winds that sting and blind,
The nights we watched, so silent,
Come back, come back to mind.

I mind about my first love,
And hear the rush and roar
Of spume below the doorstep
And winds upon the door.

Orrick Johns

I am continuing Bodenheim's theme of circuses and clowns with this outpouring from a pierrot.

They have made me an airy apology
for the crude insistence of their flesh!
They have made me twist my tongue
Into fickle nonchalance!
With a languid impudence
I have tarried underneath the moon,
While the haggard reticence
Of their lives forgot itself within me!
Well, I am rebelling
At the men who make me
Their grimacing marionnette!
Let them find another dancing-teacher
For their dull, unruffled fears.
I am off to tear my black and white
Into shreds, within a valley
Where nakedness and colours do not need
An artificial night to make them brave!

Maxwell Bodenheim

Maxwell Bodenheim certainly had a way with words.

His descriptions of these four character are amazing.

IMAGINARY PEOPLE

I: POET

You have escaped the comedy
Of swift, pretentious praise and blame,
And smashed a tavern where they sell
The harlots' wine that men call fame.
Heralds of reckless solitude
Have offered you another voice,
But men are still a tempting jest.
You roam and cannot make a choice.
When you have played distractedly
With a humility, you tire
And change the pastime to a pride.
These are but moods of one desire.
You throw an imitating gleam
Upon the dwarfs that line your road,
Then with a worn hostility
You tramp along beneath your load.

II: WOMAN

To hide your isolation, you become
Tame and loquacious, bowing to the men
Who bring you ornaments and poverties.
Your cryptic melancholy dwindles then,
Solved by the distant contrast of your words.
Your loneliness, with an amused relief,
Sits listening to your volubility
And idling with an enervated grief.
The play does not begin until you say
Your last "good-night," for you have only made
A swindled fantasy regain its parts.
Throughout the night you held an unseen blade
Upon your lap and trifled with its hilt,
And now you lift it with submissive dread.
Should you attack your loneliness and grief
Now that they are asleep? You shake your head.

III: CHILD

Like puffs of smoke inquisitively blown
Across the slight transparency of dawn,
The births of thought disperse upon your face.
A tenuous arrogance, when they have gone,
Clings to its tiny wisdom and denies
The feeble challenge. Warm emotions swarm
Upon the flushed impatience of your face
And merge to lordly, evanescent form.
New sights bring light oppression to your mind.
You struggle with a hunger that transcends
The glistening indecisions of your eyes
And wins a flitting certainty. Your trends
Lead to a fabled turmoil that escapes
The stunted messengers of trembling thought.
Yet, when your hand for moments closes tight
You feel a dagger that your fears have caught.

IV: OLD MAN

Below your skull a social gathering glows.
Weak animosities exchange a last
Chat with emotional ambassadors
Who honor the importance of your past.
You turn your hammock and surrender limbs
to sunlight, and increase the hammock's swing
As though you suavely bargained with a friend.
Its answers are impersonal and bring
A tolerance that wounds your lack of strength.
A final insurrection cleaves your rest.
You raise your back, then lower it convinced
That motion now would be a needless test. . . .
And with your falling back, the gathering
Within your head melts through a door, chagrined,
And everything within you dies except
A blue and goblin hammock in the wind.

Maxwell Bodenheim

THE GOWN YOU WEAR

The gown you wear is curiously like sound--
Tangles of dahlia-murmurs taking shape
In shrinking, mellow sprays.
The everlasting journey of your heart
Gliding over a sleepy litany
That winds through scattered star-flowers of regrets:
The everlasting journey of your heart
Is like a fragile traveler of sound--
A murmur seeking the love that gave it birth.

Maxwell Bodenheim

You would think that no one could write a poem about a rubbish tip - but Bodenheim did.

GARBAGE-HEAP

The wind was shrill and mercenary,
Like a housewife pacing down the sky.
Green weeds and tin-cans in the yard
Made a debris of ludicrous dissipations.
The ochre of cold elations
Had settled on the cans.
Their brilliant labels peeped from the weeds,
Like the remains of a charlatan.
A bone reclined against a fence-post
And mouldily congratulated life.
A woman's garter wasted its faded frills
Upon a newspaper argument.
The shipwrecked rancor of bottles and boxes
Was pressed to disfigured complexities.
A smell of torrential asperity
Knew the spirit of the yard.

Contented or incensed,
The wreckage stood in the yard,
One shade below the sardonic.

Maxwell Bodenheim

The story of 'Harlequin and Columbine' dates back to the Commedia dell'arte legend of 16th century Italy.

'Harlequinade', featuring the two characters, was popular as a form of pantomime in Britain during the 18th and 19th century, but the story of the two characters also appears in serious theatre, opera and ballet.

In some versions of 'The Nutcracker' Harlequin and Columbine are identified as two of the mechanical dolls and I think this is the representation that Bodenheim is referring to in this poem.

COLUMBINE REFLECTS

They have moulded my face with a tear and a sneer.
They have sandalled me with caprice,
And the heart they have given me
Is a bag of red tissue-paper.
Their loves are ragged and fat
And seek the consolation
Of a tinkling effigy!
But even an effigy may wink
An eye at its slinking masters!
I can laugh at their frantic, tattered arms
Spinning me into impish posturings,
And jeer at the faces behind me!
After my play I go to sleep,
But they must sit, heavily looking at each other.

Maxwell Bodenheim

About three weeks ago i posted Bodenheim's poem "Death", where he portrayed the grim reaper as a black slave, with little silver birds on his shoulder.

Today he presents a slightly different picture.

DEATH

I

A fan of smoke in the long, green-white revery of the sky,
Slowly curls apart.
So shall we rise and widen out in the silence of air.

II

An old man runs down a little yellow road
To an out-flung, white thicket uncovered by morning.
So shall I swing to the white sharpness of death.

Maxwell Bodenheim

FIGURE

Through the turbulent servility
Of a churlish city street
He strides opaquely; nothing in his walk
Resembles an advancing gleam.
His legs are muffled iron
Stubbornly following even thoughts,
His gaily pugnacious head
Seems worried because no dread
Remains for it to slay.
His eyes hold an austerity
That recalls itself while leaping,
And often melts into amusement.
The bent poise of his body
Tells of walls that threw him back,
Only to crumble underneath
The stunned friendliness of his face.
Through the angularly churlish street
He walks, and stoops beneath the captured weight
Of eyes that do not see him.

Max Bodenheim

CHANGE

I came upon a maiden
Blowing rose petals in the air
And catching them, as they fell,
Upon quick fingertips
Her laugh fell lighter than the petals
And dropped little gestures upon my forehead.
I gave her sadness and she blew it up
As she had blown the rose petals:
And it almost seemed joy as her fingers caught it.
But I was only a wanderer plaited with dust,
Who gave her new petals to play with.

Maxwell Bodenheim

ADVICE TO A RIVER STEAM-BOAT

The brass band plays upon your decks,
Like a sturdy harlot aping mirth,
And people in starched shields
Stuff their passions with sweet words,
Life is swishing in the air,
Like a tipsy, unseen bridegroom.

O humbly grunting river boat,
Take the churning water and the sun
Like one who plays with his own chains
And flings their turmoil to the sky.
Only a voice can leap above high walls.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Sirona

MANNERS

Gingerly, the poets sit.
Gingerly, they spend
The adjectives of dribbling flatteries,
With here and there a laceration
Feeding on the poison of a smile.
In the home of the poet-host
That bears the slants of a commonplace,
Eagerly distributed--
The accepted lyrical note--
The poets sit.
The poets drink much wine
And tug a little at their garments,
Weighing the advantages of disrobing.
(It is necessary to call them "poets"
Since, according to custom,
Titles are generously given to the attempt.)
Sirona, cousin of the poet-host,
Munches on a feast of words.
She endeavors to convince herself
That her hunger has become an illusion.
The poets, capitulating to wine,
Leave their birds and twilights,
Their trees and cattle at evening,
And study Sirona's body--
Their manacled hands still joined
By the last half-broken link.
Beneath her ill-fitting worship
Young Sirona fears
That the poets are wordy animals
Circled by brocaded corsets. . . .
Sirona, if you stood on your head
Now, and waved the brave plan of your legs,
Undisturbed by cloth,
The poets would be convinced
That you were either insane or angling.
But an exceptional poet,
Never present at these parties,
Would compliment your vigour
And scoff at the vain deceptions of privacy.
Vulgarity, Sirona, is often a word
Invented by certain men to defend
Their disdain for other men, who chuckle
At the skulking tyrannies of fashion.
Few men, Sirona, dare to become
Completely vulgar, but many
Nibble at the fringes.

Maxwell Bodenheim

In Celtic mythology, Sirona was a goddess worshipped predominantly in East Central Gaul and along the Danubian limes. A healing deity, she was associated with healing springs; her attributes were wolves and children.

THE CHILD MEDITATES

The oak-tree in front of my house
Smells different every morning.
Sometimes it smells fresh and wise
Like my mother's hair.
Sometimes it stands ashamed
Because it doesn't own the smell
It borrowed from our flower-garden.
Sometimes it has a windy smell,
As though it had come back from a long walk.
The oak-tree in front of my house
Has different smells, like grown up people.

My doll hides behind her pink cheeks,
So that you can't see when she moves,
But it doesn't matter because
She always moves when no one is looking,
And that is why people think she is still.
People laugh when I say that my doll is alive,
But if she were dead, my fingers
Wouldn't know that they were touching her.
She lives inside a little house.
And laughs because I cannot find the door.

The colours in my room
Meet each other and hesitate.
Is that what people call shape?
Nobody seems to think so,
But I believe that lines are dead shapes
Unless they fall against each other
And look surprised, like the colours in my room.

Maxwell Bodenheim

"When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways."

In some respects that is a pity. Children sometimes have a simplicity and clarity of thought not found in many adults.

The grinning clamour on your face
Dies abruptly, for moments:
Boldness and timidity
Are swept, transfigured, against each other.
But the glistening turmoil
Once more spurns itself with jests
That light its troubled hands.

When too much pain has lowered
The eyelids of your mood,
A peaceful humour wraps your face.
You are like an old man
Watching children fly from his fingertips.
In your kirtle of borrowed skies
You find a sorrow luring your horizons
Into hesitating brightness. . . .

Max Bodenheim

LOVE

You seemed a caryatid melting
Into the wind-blown, dark blue temple of the sky.
But you bent down as I came closer, breaking the image.
When I passed, you raised your head
And blew the little feather of a smile upon me.
I caught it on open lips and blew it back.
And in that moment we loved,
Although you stood still waiting for your lover,
And I walked on to my love.

Maxwell Bodenheim

* "Caryatid": A stone carving of a draped female figure, used as pillar to support the entablature of a Greek or Greek-style building.

SOLDIERS

The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid
Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond.
The lips of one are twisted
To a hieroglyphic of silence.
The face of another is like a shining frog.
Another face is met by a question
That digs into it like sudden claws.
Beside it is a face like a mirror
In which a stiffened child dangles. . .

Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent,
Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence.

Maxwell Bodenheim

HILL-SIDE TREE

Like a drowsy, rain-browned saint,
You squat, and sometimes your voice
In which the wind takes no part,
Is like mists of music wedding each other.
A drunken, odor-laced peddler is the morning wind.
He brings you golden-scarfed cities
Whose voices are swirls of bells burdened with summer;
And maidens whose hearts are galloping princes.
And you raise your branches to the sky,
With a whisper that holds the smile you cannot shape.

Maxwell Bodenheim

COTTON-PICKER

Like the arms of a child lifting shining white lilies from a little brown pond,
Sunlight drew songs from this lithe, grimacing negress
Whose skin was smoother than the cloudless sky above her.
The flecks of cotton they picked brought a changing white stupor
To the negroes about her, but she swung down her row,
With broad smiles cutting her pent-up satin face.
And though the afternoon slowly pressed down her back,
She never ceased humming to her joyous Christ.

Maxwell Bodenheim

1930

BROADWAY

With sardonic futility
The multi-coloured crowd,
Hurried by fervent sensuality,
Flees from something carried on its back.
Endlessly subdued, a sound
Pours up from the crowd,
Like some one ever gasping for breath
to utter releasing words.
Through the artificial valley
Made by gaudy evasions,
The stifled crowd files up and down,
Stabbing thought with rapid noises.
Women strutting dulcetly,
Embroider their unappeased hungers,
And men stumble toward a flitting opiate.
Sometimes a moment breaks apart
And one can hear the knuckles
Of children rapping on towering doors:
Rapping on the highway
Where civilization parades
Its frozen amiabilities!

Maxwell Bodenheim

No doubt this poem was drawn from Bodenheim's Bohemian lifestyle in Greenwich Village, New York.

JACK ROSE

With crafty brooding life turned to Jack Rose
And made him heroin-peddler, and his pose
Was sullenly reflective since he feared
That life, regarding him, had merely jeered.
His vanity was small and could not call
His egoism to the dubious hall
Of fame, where average artists spend their hour.
Doubting his powers he was forced to cower
Within the shrill, damp alleys of his time,
Immersed in that brisk midnight known as crime.
He shunned the fiercely shrewd stuff that he sold
To other people, and derived a cold
Enjoyment from the writhing of their hearts.
A speechless artist, he admired the arts
Of blundering destruction, like a monk
Viewing a play that made him mildly drunk.
And so malicious and ascetic jack
Bent to his trade with a relentless back
Until he tapped an unexpected smile--
A woman's smile as smooth and hard as tile.
May Bulger pawned her flesh to him and gave
His heroin to her brother, with a grave
Reluctance fumbling at her painted lips.
Though angry at herself, she took the whips
Of undesired love, to quiet a boy
Who wept inanely for his favorite toy.
She hated Jack because he failed to gloss
And soften the rough surface of her loss,
His matter-of-fact frown biting at her heart.
He hated her because her smiling guess
Had robbed him of ascetic loneliness,
And when her brother died, Jack sat beside
Her grief and played a mouth-harp while she cried.
But when she raised her head and smiled at him--
A smile intensely stripped and subtly grim--
His hate felt overawed and in a trap,
And suddenly his head fell to her lap.
For some time she sat stiffly in the chair,
Then slowly raised her hand and stroked his hair.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Today's poem is an excellent example of Bodenheim's powers of observation and imagination.

I have been unable to find a suitable illustration, so I am leaving it to the poet to provide the images.

BOARDING HOUSE EPISODE

Apples race into appetites:
The unswerving mechanism of the table
Hurries through the last dish of supper.
Then an undulating interlude
From people who have spent one pleasure,
Distractedly juggling its aftermath
And peering at new desires.
One woman gazes at another
While twitching murder shimmers in her eyes
And skims across her face.
Violets in a madman's scene,
Suspended in the air,
Are the eyes of her neighbour.
And in between them sits the nervous man
With face like pouting gargoyle,
Whose brown eyes shout the things he cannot say:
Explosive evasions;
Fears too tired to shriek;
Renunciations groaning from their dungeons.
He eyes each woman, like a man
Solemnly trying to walk on mysterious ice.
Crisp inanities ripple back and forth
Among these three, like ghostly parrots
Visiting each other's cages.
She with crazy, violet eyes,
Plays with her fork, as though its clink
Rhymed with secret, chained thoughts;
She with murder in her eyes,
And curtly voluminous body,
Evenly plays her child-rôle.
Cringing on the rim of middle age,
With broken shields piled at her feet,
She has made this man a haunted palace
And she stands before the door
She dare not open, with a dagger
For the woman standing at her side.

They sit, afterwards, upon the veranda,
Meekly greeting the velvet swagger of evening:
Woman with twisted, violet eyes,
Woman with hidden murder on her lips,
And man like a pouting gargoyle.
Then, like tired children,
Their words grow cool and lazy.
They draw closer to each other
And, with a trembling curiosity,
Look at each other's hands.

Maxwell Bodenheim

BLIND

Blinder than oak-trees in the wind
Endlessly weaving sighs into a poem
To sight,
He sits, the light of one pale purple lantern
Seeping into his dream-hollowed face,
Like floating, transparent words
Pale with unuttered meanings.
He mends a flute and sighs as though
Its shadow leaned heavily upon his heart
And told him things his dead eyes could not grasp.

Maxwell Bodenheim

EAST-SIDE: NEW YORK

An old Jew munches an apple,
With conquering immersion
All the thwarted longings of his life
Urge on his determined teeth.
His face is hard and pear-shaped;
His eyes are muddy capitulations;
But his mouth is incongruous.
Softly, slightly distended,
Like that of a whistling girl,
It is ingenuously haunting
And makes the rest of him a soiled, grey background.
Hopes that lie within their grave
Of submissive sternness,
Have spilled their troubled ghosts upon this mouth,
And a tortured belief
Has dwindled into tenderness upon it ...
He trudges off behind his push-cart
And the Ghetto walks away with him.

Maxwell Bodenheim

TO ONE DEAD

I walked upon a hill
And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence,
Reeled against me.
I stooped to question a flower,
And you floated between my fingers and the petals,
Tying them together.
I severed a leaf from its tree
And a water-drop in the green flagon
Cupped a hunted bit of your smile.
All things about me were steeped in your remembrance
And shivering as they tried to tell me of it.

Maxwell Bodenheim

FRIENDSHIP

Grey, drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edges
Of bending swirls of yellow-white flowers.
So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you.

A green-shadowed trance of water
Is splintered to little, white tasseled awakenings
By the beat of long, black oars.
So do my thoughts enter yours.

Split, brown-blue clouds press into each other
Over hills dressed in mute, clinging haze.
So do my thoughts slowly form
Over the draped mystery of you.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Maxwell wrote several short poems titled "Advice to . . . "

Here is one of them.

ADVICE TO A POOL

Be a liquid threshold for the dawn
And let night touch you with his back.
The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds

Are only pause and rhythm
Within an endless fantasy,
But you, like they, can be
A dream from the loins of a dream,
And build a golden stairway of escape.

O coolly unperturbed pool,
Slap your ripples in laughter at men,
Who splash you with their lordly hands.
Time is but a phantom dagger
That motion lifts to slay itself.

Maxwell Bodenheim

I promised you something more tender from Maxwell Bodenheim - and here it is.

As we have often noted, the most interesting and moving poets are those who experience the extremes of emotions - from the depths to the heights.

POET TO HIS LOVE

An old silver church in a forest
Is my love for you.
The trees around it
Are words that I have stolen from your heart.
An old silver bell, the last smile you gave,
Hangs at the top of my church.
It rings only when you come through the forest
And stand beside it.
And then, it has no need for ringing,
For your voice takes its place.

Maxwell Bodenheim