For The Marriage of Faustus and Helen

"

And so we may arrive by Talmud skill And profane Greek to raise the building up Of Helen's house against the Ismaelite, King of Thogarma, and his habergeons Brimstony, blue and fiery; and the force Of King A baddon, and the beast of Cittim; Which Rabbi David Kimchi, Onkelos, And A ben Ezra do interpret Rome.

"

-THE ALCHEMIST.

I

The mind has shown itself at times

Too much the baked and labeled dough

Divided by accepted multitudes.

Across the stacked partitions of the day-

Across the memoranda, baseball scores,

The stenographic smiles and stock quotations

Smutty wings flash out equivocations.

The mind is brushed by sparrow wings;

Numbers, rebuffed by asphalt, crowd

The margins of the day, accent the curbs,

Convoying divers dawns on every' corner

To druggist, barber and tobacconist,

Until the graduate opacities of evening

Take them away as suddenly to somewhere

Virginal perhaps, less fragmentary, cool.

There is the world dimensional for

those untwisted by the love of things

irreconcilable…

And yet, suppose some evening I forgot

The fare and transfer, yet got by that way

Without recall,-lost yet poised in traffic.

Then I might find your eyes across an aisle,

Still flickering with those prefigurations-

Prodigal, yet uncontested now,

Half-riant before the jerky window frame.

There is some way, I think, to touch

Those hands of yours that count the nights

Stippled with pink and green advertisements.

And now, before its arteries turn dark

I would have you meet this bartered blood.

Imminent in his dream, none better knows

The white wafer cheek of love, or offers words

Lightly as moonlight on the eaves meets snow.

Reflective conversion of all things

At your deep blush, when ecstasies thread

The limbs and belly, when rainbows spread

Impinging on the throat and sides

Inevitable, the body of the world

Weeps in inventive dust for the hiatus

That winks above it', bluet in your breasts.

The earth may glide diaphanous to death;

But if I lift my arms it is to bend

To you who turned away once, Helen, knowing

The press of troubled hands, too alternate

With steel and soil to hold you endlessly.

I meet you, therefore, in that eventual flame

You found in final chains, no captive then

Beyond their million brittle, bloodshot eyes;

White, through white cities passed on to assume

That world which comes to each of us alone.

Accept a lone eye riveted to your plane,

Bent axle of devotion along companion ways

That beat, continuous, to hourless days-

0ne inconspicuous, glowing orb of praise.

II

Brazen hypnotics glitter here;

Glee shifts from foot to foot,

Magnetic to their tremulo.

This crashing opera bouffe,

Blest excursion! this ricochet

From roof to roof-

Know, Olympians, we are breathless

While nigger cupids scour the stars!

A thousand light shrugs balance us

Through snarling hails of melody.

White shadows slip across the floor

Splayed like cards from a loose hand;

Rhythmic ellipses lead into canters

Until somewhere a rooster banters.

Greet naively-yet intrepidly

New soothings, new amazements

That cornets introduce at every turn-

And you may fall downstairs with me

With perfect grace and equanimity.

Or, plaintively scud past shores

Where, by strange harmonic laws

All relatives, serene and cool,

Sit rocked in patent armchairs.

0, I have known metallic paradises

Where cuckoos clucked to finches

Above the deft catastrophes of drums.

While titters hailed the groans of death

Beneath gyrating awnings I have seen

The incunabula of the divine grotesque.

This music has a reassuring way,

The siren of the ' springs of guilty song-

Let us take her on the incandescent wax

Striated with nuances nervosities

That we are heir to: she is still so young,

She cannot frown upon her as she smiles,

Dipping here in this cultivated storm

Among slim skaters of the gardened skies.

III

Capped arbiter of beauty in this street

That narrows -darkly into motor dawn,

You, here beside m/e, delicate ambassador

Of intricate slain numbers that arise

In whispers, naked of steel;

religious gunman!

Who faithfully, yourself, will fall too soon,

And in other ways than as the wind settles

On the sixteen thrifty bridges of the city:

Let us unbind our throats of fear and pity.

We even,

Who drove speediest destruction

In corymbulous formations of mechanics,-

Who hurried the hill breezes, spouting malice

Plangent over meadows, and looked down

On rifts of torn and empty houses

Like old women with teeth unjubilant

That waited faintly, briefly and in vain:

We know, eternal gunman, our flesh remembers

The tensile boughs, the nimble blue plateaus,

The mounted, yielding cities of the air!

That saddled sky that shook down vertical

Repeated play of fire-no hypogeum

Of wave or rock was good against one hour.

We did not ask for that, but have survived,

And will persist to speak again before

All stubble streets that have not curved

To memory, or known the ominous lifted arm

That lowers down the arc of Helen's brow

To saturate with blessing and dismay.

A goose, tobacco and cologne-

Three winged and gold-shod prophecies of heaven,

The lavish heart shall always have to leaven

And spread with bells and voices, and atone

The abating shadows of our conscript dust.

Anchises' navel, dripping of the sea,-

The hands Erasmus dipped in gleaming tides,

Gathered the voltage of blown blood and vine;

Delve upward for the new and scattered wine,

0 brother-thief of time, that we recall.

Laugh out the meager penance of their days

Who dare not share with us the breath released,

The substance drilled and spent beyond repair

For golden, or the shadow of gold hair.

Distinctly praise the years, whose volatile

Blamed bleeding hands extend and thresh the height

The imagination spans beyond despair,

Outpacing bargain, vocable and prayer.