POEMS AND PROSE

I am off to Paris for a few days and cosequently the next post to this blog will be on Wednesday 1st April.

Please come back then.

THE INTERNE

O the agony of having too much power!
In my passive palm are hundreds of lives.
Strange alchemy, they drain my blood.
My heart becomes iron; my brain copper; my eyes silver; my lips brass.
Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from me,
Strong-winged or fluttering and broken.
They are my children: I am their mother and father.
I watch them live and die.

Maxwell Bodenheim

UNDERFOOT

ADVICE TO A STREET-PAVEMENT

Lacerated grey has bitten
Into your shapeless humility.
Little episodes of roving
Strew their hieroglyphics on your muteness.
Life has given you heavy stains
Like an ointment growing stale.
Endless feet tap over you
With a maniac insistence.

O unresisting street-pavement,
Keep your passive insolence
At the dwarfs who scorn you with their feet.
Only one who lies upon his back
Can disregard the stars.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Seasons bring nothing to this gulch
Save a harshly intimate anecdote
Scrawled, here and there, on paint and stone.
The houses shoulder each other
In a forced and passionless communion.
Their harassed angles rise
Like a violent picture-puzzle
Hiding a story that only ruins could reveal;
Their straight lines, robbed of power,
Meet in dwarfed rebellion.
Sometimes they stand like vastly flattened faces
Suffering ants to crawl
In and out of their gaping mouths.
Sometimes, in menial attitudes
They stand like Gothic platitudes
Slipshodly carved in dark brown stone.
Tarnished solemnities of death
Cast their transfigured hue on this avenue.
The cool and indiscriminate glare
Of sunlight seems to desecrate a tomb,
And the racing people seem
A stream of accidental shadows.
Hard noises strike one's face and make
It numb with momentary reality,
But the noiseless undertone returns
And they change to unreal jests
Made by death.

Maxwell Bodenheim

INSANITY

Like a vivid hyperbole,
The sun plunged into April's freshness,
And struck its sparkling madness
Against the barnlike dejection
Of this dark red insane asylum.
A softly clutching noise
Stumbled from the open windows.
Now and then obliquely reeling shrieks
Rose, as though from men
To whom death had assumed
An inexpressibly kind face.
A man stood at one window,
His gaunt face trembling underneath
A feverish jauntiness.
A long white feather slanted back
Upon his almost shapeless hat,
Like an innocent evasion.
Hotly incessant, his voice
Methodically flogged the April air:
A voice that held the clashing bones
Of happiness and fear;
A voice in which emotion
Sharply ridiculed itself;
A monstrously vigorous voice
Mockingly tearing a life
With an unanswerable question.

Hollowed out by his howl,
I turned and saw an asylum guard.
His petulantly flabby face
Rolled into deathlike chips of eyes.
He bore the aimless confidence
Of one contentedly playing with other men's wings.
He walked away; the man above still shrieked.
I could not separate them.

Maxwll Bodenheim

Who was Alvin Spar? I can find no reference to him on the internet.

this is a summarised story of his life.

CONDENSED NOVEL

Shun the abundant paragraphs
With which a novelist interviews shades
Of physical appearance in one man,
And regard the body of Alvin Spar
Curtained by more aristocratic words.
"Alvin Spar in adolescence
Was neither slim nor rotund,
But slightly aware of future corpulence.
The face that Aristotle may have had
Was interfering, bit by bit,
With an outer face of pouting curves.
Alvin Spar in youth
Held half of the face that Aristotle
May have had, and the pungent directness
Of a stable-boy.
Alvin Spar in middle age
Had the face that Aristotle
May have had--a large austerity
Disputing the bloom of well-selected emotions.
Straight nose, thick lips, low forehead
Were apprentices to the austerity
That often stepped beyond them.
Alvin Spar in old age
Had drawn the wrinkled bed-quilts
Over the face that Aristotle
May have had, but his eyes peered out,
Fighting with sleep."
Shuffle the cards on which I have written
Alvin Spar's changes in physical appearance,
And deal them out to the various players.
Accident first, then the qualities of the players--
These two will struggle to dominate
The movements of the plot.
The plot of this novel will ascend
In twenty lines and escape
The honoured adulteration so dear to men.
"Alvin Spar loved a woman
Who poured acid on his slumber
By showing him the different fools within him.
Sincerely longing for wisdom
He married her, while she desired
A pupil whom she could lazily beat.
She convinced him that emotions
Were simply periods of indecision
Within the mind, and with emphasis
He walked to another woman.
The second woman loved him,
But she was merely to him
Clay for mental sculpture.
She killed herself, believing
That he might become to her in death
A figure less remote and careful.
He forgot her in an hour
And used the rest of his life
In finding women over whom he could tower. . . .
He died while madly straying over his heights."
The incidental people, chatter, and background?
You will find them between
Pages one and four-hundred
Of the latest bulk in prose.

Maxwell Bodenheim

A man is sitting within the enigmatic turmoil of a railroad station. His face is narrow and young, and his nose, lips, and eyes carved to a Semitic sharpness, have been sundered by a bloodless catastrophe. A traveling-bag stands at his feet. Around him people are clutching farewells and shouting greetings. Within him a monologue addresses an empty theatre.

I am strangling emotions
And casting them into the seats
Of an empty theatre.
When my lifeless audience is complete,
The ghosts of former emotions
Will entertain their dead masters.
After each short act
A humorous ghost will fly through the audience,
Striking the limp hands into applause,
And between the acts
Sepulchral indifference will mingle
With the dust upon the backs of seats.
Upon the stage a melodrama
And a travesty will romp
Against a back-drop of fugitive resignation.
Climax and anti-climax
Will jilt each other and drift
Into a cheated insincerity.
Sometimes the lights will retire
While a shriek and laugh
Make a martyr of the darkness.
When the lights reappear
An actor-ghost will assure the audience
That nothing has happened save
The efforts of a fellow ghost
To capture life again.
In his role of usher
Another ghost will arrange
The lifeless limbs of the audience
Into postures of relief.
Sometimes a comedy will trip
The feet of an assassin,
Declaring that if ghosts were forced
To undergo a second death
Their thinness might become unbearable.
At other times indignant tragedy
Will banish an intruding farce,
Claiming that life should not retain
The luxury of another laugh.
The first act of the play will show
The owner of the theatre
Conversing with the ghost of a woman.
As unresponsive as stone
Solidly repelling a spectral world,
His words will keenly betray
The bloodless control of his features.
He will say: "With slightly lowered shoulders,
Because of a knife sticking in my back,
I shall trifle with crowded highways,
Buying decorations
For an interrupted bridal-party.
This process will be unimportant
To the workshop of my mind
Where love and death are only
Colourless problems upon a chart."
The ghost of the woman will say:
"Your mind is but the rebellious servant
Of sensitive emotions
And brings them clearer dominance."
And what shall I mournfully answer?
I am strangling emotions
And casting them into the seats
Of an empty theatre.

Maxwell Bodenheim

THE COURTESAN CHATS

Last night I met a passive man
With almost no curve to his face,
And skin relentlessly white.
He made me tell his fortune
With a pack of cards.
"Jack of hearts--your love will be
A scullion overturning trays of food
And standing dubiously in their midst."
"Queen of diamonds--you will have a wife
Like a thistle dipped in frost,
Helpless in your sheathed hands."
"Deuce of clubs--a downcast jester
Will pester you with slanting malice
When you seek to play the king."
"Ace of hearts--your life will stand
Straight in a desperate majesty,
Its lurid robes ever slipping
And one wound endlessly dripping."

The passive man blew out a candle
On the table and bade me leave,
Not desiring me to see his face.

Maxwell Bodenheim

The wrinkled grimaces of eastern skies
Are caught on the Chinese mirrors of your eyes
And lie, pallid and benign.
Your mouth is a senile dragon
Spitting fire-fly words from its vermillion shroud.
Your cheeks are shrunken silences of Gods
Paling out upon ivoried Nirvanas of silk.
Your face holds fugitive bits of your heart
That wandered away and returned to rest.

Maxwell Bodenheim

REAR PORCHES OF AN APARTMENT BUILDING

A sky that has never known sun, moon, or stars,
A sky that is like a dead, kind face
Would have the color of your eyes,
O servant-girl singing of pear-trees in the sun
And scraping the yellow fruit you once picked
When your lavender-white eyes were alive.
On the porch above you sit two women
With faces the color of dry brown earth;
They knit grey rosettes and nibble cakes.
And on the porch above them are three children
Gravely kissing each other's foreheads,
And an ample nurse with a huge red fan. . . .
The death of afternoon to them
Is but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls.

Maxwell Bodenheim

THE CAMP-FOLLOWER

We spoke, the camp-follower and I.
About us was a cold, pungent odor --
Gun-powder, stale wine, wet earth, and the smell of thousands of men.
She said it reminded her of the scent
In the house of prostitutes she had lived in.
About us were soldiers -- hordes of scarlet women, stupidly, smilingly giving up their bodies
To a putrid-lipped, chuckling lover -- Death;
While their mistress in tinsel whipped them on....
She spoke of a woman she had known in Odessa,
Owner of a huge band of girls,
Who had pocketed their earnings for years,
Only to be used, swindled and killed by some nobleman....
She said she thought of this grinning woman
Whenever she saw an officer brought back from battle, dead....
And I sat beside her and wondered.

Maxwell Bodenheim

EAST SIDE MOVING PICTURE THEATRE - SUNDAY

An old woman rubs her eyes
As though she were stroking children back to life.
A slender Jewish boy whose forehead
Is tall, and like a wind-marked wall,
Restlessly waits while leaping prayers
Clash their light-cymbals within his eyes.
And a little hunchbacked girl
Straightens her back with a slow-pulling smile.
(I am afraid to look at her again.)

Then the blurred, tawdry pictures rush across the scene,
And I hear a swishing intake of breath,
As though some band of shy rigid spirits
Were standing before their last heaven.

Maxwell Bodenheim

ADVICE TO A FOREST

O trees, to whom the darkness is a child
Scampering in and out of your long, green beards;
O trees, to whom sunlight is a tattered pilgrim
Counting his dreams within your hermitage
And slipping down the road, in twilight robes;
O trees, whose leaves make an incense of sound
Reeling with the beat of your caught feet,
Do not mingle your tips in startled hatred,
When little men come to fell you.
These men will saw you into strips
Of pointed brooding, blind with paint,
But underneath you men will chase
The grey staccato of their lives
Down a glaring maze of walls
Much harder than your own.
And when, at last, the deep brown gaze
Of stolidly amorous time steals over you,
The little men who bit into your hearts
Will stray off in a patter of rabbits' feet.
Look down upon these children then
With the aloof and weary tolerance
That all still things possess,
O trees, to whom the darkness was a child
Scampering in and out of your long, green beards.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Although he was born in 1892, he died in 1954 - not 1962.

SIMPLE ACCOUNT OF A POET'S LIFE

In 1892
When literature and art in America
Presented a mildewed but decorous mien,
He was born.
During the first months of his life
His senses had not yet learned to endure
The majestic babble of old sterilities.
The vacuum of his brain
Felt a noisy thinness outside,
Which it could not hear or see,
And gave it the heavier substance
Of yells that were really creation
Fighting its way to form.
(When babies shriek they seek
Power in thought and action.
Life objects to their intent
And forces their voices to repent.)
At the age of four he lived inwardly,
With enormous shapeless emotions
Taking his limbs, like waves.
His mind was vapour censured
By an occasional protest
That mumbled and could not be heard.
People to him were headless figures--
Bodies surmounted by voices
That tickled like feathers, or struck like rocks.
Missiles thrown from moving mountain-tops
And leaving only resentment at their touch.
At ten the voices receded
To invisible meanings
That toyed with flesh-protected secrets of faces.
The voices made promises
Which the faces continually evaded,
And often the voices in vengeance
Changed a lip or an eye-brow
To repeat their neglected demands.
When swung to him the voices
Were insolent enigmas,
Tripping him as he stood
Midway between fright and indifference.
He sometimes tittered tranquilly
At the obvious absurdity of this.
His rages were false and sprang
From aloof thoughts chanting over their chains.
The immediate cause of each rage
Merely opened a door
Upon this changeless inner condition.
That species of intoxicated thought
Which men describe as emotion
Used its merriment to blind his eye-sight.
But anger, whose real roots are in the mind,
Tendered him times of hot perception.
He noticed that children held flexible flesh
That wisely sought a variety of patterns--
Flesh intent upon correcting
Its closeted effect--
While older people enticed their flesh
Into erect and formal lies
Repeated until their patience died
And they tried an unpracticed rebellion.
This was a formless revelation,
Unattended by words
But throwing its indistinct contrast
Over his broad one-colored thought.
At sixteen he employed words
To flay the contrast into shapes.
At seventeen he decided
To emulate the gay wisdom of children's flesh.
He deliberately borrowed whiskey
To wipe away the lessons of older people
Lest they intrude their sterility
Upon his plotting exuberance.
He placed his hands on women,
Gently, boldly, as one
Experimenting with a piano.
He stole money, begged on street-corners,
And answered people with an actual knife
Merely to give his thoughts and emotions
A changing reason for existence.
Moderation seemed to him
A figure half asleep and half awake
And mutilating the truth of each condition.
At twenty-four his flesh became tired,
And to amuse the weariness
His hands wrote poetry.
He had done this before,
But only as a gleeful reprimand
To the speed of his limbs.
Now he wrote with the motives of one
Whose flesh is passing into less visible manners.
At times he returned to more concrete motions,
To befriend the handmaiden of his flesh,
But gradually he longed
For the complete secrecy of written creation,
Enjoying the novelty of a hiding-place.
In 1962
He died with a grin at the fact
That literature and art in America
Were still presenting a mildewed, decorous mien.

Maxwell Bodenheim

SMILES

Smiles are the words beyond the words
That thoughts abandon helplessly.
Upon this nervous shop-girl's face,
Where clusters of tiny limpness meet,
A frightened spark leaps high and drops
Into the hot pause of a banished love.
A lustrelessly plump
Girl beside her does not know
That her face for moments glows
Into a helpless solitude.
Upon an old man's face
Are gleams of meek embarrassment--
The faded presence of some old debt?
This woman's face is scorched
By a torch that falls from weary hands
And makes her laugh an unheard lie.
The face of this tamed sprite
Shimmers with an understanding
Of the opaque loss she cannot bear,
And I see that smiles are sometimes
Words beyond words
That thoughts abandon hopefully.

Maxwell Bodenheim

TO A MAN

Master of earnest equilibrium,
You are a Christ made delicate
By centuries of baffled meditation.
You curve an old myth to a peaceful sword,
Like some sleep-walker challenging
The dream that gave him shape.
With gentle, antique insistence
You place your child's hand on the universe
And trace a smile of love within its depths.
And yet, the whirling scarecrow men have made
Of something that eludes their sight,
May have the startling simplicity of your smile.

Once every thousand years
Stillness fades into a shape
That men may crucify.

Maxwell Bodenheim

ADVICE TO A BUTTERFLY

Aimless petal of the wind,
Spinning gently weird circles,
To the flowers underneath
You are a drunken king of motion;
To the plunging winds above
You are momentary indecision.

Aimless petal of the wind,
Waver carelessly against this June.
The universe, like you, is but
The drowsy arm of stillness
Spinning gently weird circles in his sleep.

Maxwell Bodenheim

We met upon nearby hill-tops of our lives
And shook the dust from us, revealing flame-laced clothes
And eyeing each other in the same moment.
You curved a longing to the wave of your arm:
A longing for dark rest crossed by unbidden gifts.
And my eyes deepened in answer. . . .
Then we floated down to the valley between us:
The valley ringed with smooth honey-combs of sleep.

Maxwell Bodenheim

OLD AGE

In me is a little painted square
Bordered by old shops, with gaudy awnings.
And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men,
Drinking sunlight.
The old men are my thoughts:
And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart,
And quietly unload supplies.
We fill slim pipes and chat,
And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the square. . . .
Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing children
Stroll past us, or into the shops.
They greet the shopkeepers, and touch their hats or foreheads to me. . . .
Some evening I shall not return to my people.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Who can make a delicate adventure
Of walking on the ground?
Who can make grass-blades
Arcades for pertly careless straying?
You alone, who skim against these leaves,
Turning all desire into light whips
Moulded by your deep blue wing-tips,
You who shrill your unconcern
Into the sternly antique sky.
You to whom all things
Hold an equal kiss of touch.

Mincing, wanton blue-bird,
Grimace at the hoofs of passing men.
You alone can lose yourself
Within a sky, and rob it of its blue!

Max Bodenheim

Brown faces twisted back
Into an ecstasy of tight resistance;
Eyes that are huge sweat drops
Unheeded by the struggle underneath them--
Throughout the night you stagger under walls
Where life is squeezed to squealing bitterness.
Beneath your heaving flash of limbs
Your thoughts are smashed to a dejected trance
And you are swept, like empty mites,
Into a glistening frenzy of motion ...
Yet, on a Sunday afternoon
I have seen you straightening your backs with slow smiles;
Walking through the streets
And patiently groping for lost outlines.
Your lips were placid bruises
Almost fearing to relax,
And often out upon some green
Your legs swung themselves into long lost shapes.

Perhaps upon your death-beds
You will lift your hands, with a wraith of grace,
Showing life a last, weak curve
Of the rhythm he could not kill.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Afternoon sunlight limps tenuously away,
Leaving a snarled retrospect of golden foot-marks.
The sea is pregnant with gracious discords
That falteringly shroud the sleep-rhymed breasts of winds.
The sky is a genially vacant stare.
Remaining touches of starlight
Tremble the leaves when air is still. . . .
And so my love for you strolls through the day,
Picking up forgotten hints of its heart.

Maxwell Bodenheim

YOU ARE A WELL

You are a well sprayed with cool rubies of sound
In which I bathe and rise with another skin
Like moon-stone passion slyly courting
The light breath of a tired dream.
I drop my heart into the depths
Of your disheveled serenity,
And stroll off empty.
When my heart has merged to your shades of pearl quietness
I return and once more drop within you.

Maxwell Bodenheim

LIKE PRAYERS BORN DEAD

Like prayers born dead, long shadows
Strew the floor and clutch at your feet,
But buoyant with paint you walk to and fro.
The room is garlanded with unseen eyes
That you must evade lest they touch you into sight
And send you, naked, into the moonlight.

Maxwell Bodenheim

WE BLEW A LUMINOUS CONFUSION OF THOUGHTS

We blew a luminous confusion of thoughts
Upon the silence of our souls,
Staining it to little, weeping tints.
Our hands pressed serpentine pain into each other
And stroked it away to twilights of relief.
Our lips shook before the tread of coming words,
But closed again, finding no need for them.

Maxwell Bodenheim

This street is callous apathy
In a scale of greys and browns.
Its black roof-line suggests
Flat bodies unable to rise.
Even its screams are listlessness
Having an evil dream.
Its air is swarthy rawness
Troubled with ash cans and cellars.

An old woman ambles on
With a black bag that seems part of her back,
And a candidly hawk-like face.
She croons a smothered lullaby
That sifts a flitting roundness
Into her sharply parted face.
Then she surrenders her hand
To the welter of a garbage can.
A hugely wilted woman slinks by
With a cracked stare on her face.
Her eyes are beaten discs
Of the lamplight's ghastly keenness.
She glides away as though the night
Were a lover flogging her;
Glides into the callous apathy
Of this street, like one who cringes
Happily into her lover's hallway.

Maxwell Bodenheim

Perhaps Bodenheim's shorter poems are easier to understand, like this one.

TWO WALLS, DIZZY WITH RAIN-TOUCH

Two walls, dizzy with rain-touch
And suffused with gauzily amorous sunlight,
Creep over a hill and meet
And so our foreheads touch.

Silence between our hands grows into clasped music
Sprinkling our finger-tips with attenuated chords of touch.
Our hearts weave low songs to this accompaniment:
So low that even silence cannot hear.

Maxwell Bodenheim