Read Bedouin of the London Evening Online
Authors: Rosemary Tonks
Bedouin of the London Evening (5 page)
I am sick mortar and anonymous
Like that night worker
Who must wreck his health
By eating fog in cities
Laid up very still in breath.
But do not blame my illness
On the grave that digs itself
From ‘one day’ to my shoe
And nudges to be stuffed.
The fault lies with the tutor
Who gave too powerful an instruction
In Creation, that I am stricken
And anonymous on city nights,
Who had no right to show me Earth
Abroad in Limbo with her clouds
That browse about her in bright fleets,
Or deeply with his thumbprint mark
The softly-beating mortar of my heart.
He knew that his tuition
In so powerful a Creation
That roosts abroad in Ether
Thickly hung with blazing fleece,
Would groom me for damnation
In the city among men
For to bite the dust anonymous
At night is twice as bitter
When the appetite is great.
For my fierce hot-blooded sulkiness
I need the café – where old mats
Of paper lace catch upon coatsleeves
That are brilliant with the nap of idleness
…And the cant of the meat-fly is eternal!
On the window is the milk of lazy breath,
And the coalcart rumbles – with huge purses
Full of dust and narcotics for the masses!
Sin pricks me like a convict’s suit of arrows
For here my evil, blue, and moody youth
Has found its old lair…at the bottom
Of the soil path in the bed of stinging nettles
That are splashed with wood milk
And have every hair upon them raised to strike!
There is no trade can lure me out with bundle,
Noose, and feeding-bag; I know that fate
Has graves to fill in daily life,
And the jargon of the meat-fly’s leaded wing
To put to sleep the citizen
Employed in keeping worms at bay by breathing.
In the room with the water mark as rich as sago on the wall, the young head of a minx asleep sheds on cheap linen the pale silk hair of baby Kensington.
An apricot fabric, hanging in wads lightly grimed, admits morning. The furnishings have picked themselves clothing as country bushes with hooks are able to dress from passing children. A tumbler of green beach glass with some spillings, bright water ovals firm on dust, is the bedside comfort.
Against hair and sheet the mesmerised face is very slightly active. Paint burns from yesterday’s gouache are healing on the mouth; it passes some great supernatural illness with the zither of a little healthy breath. The shorthand typist at seventeen: on either side of warm nostril she presses crossly to her cheek the stiff gilt lashes of a court page.
In the underframe of the window, beading records a lorry from the world; buzz of a giant ’cello string. A chest of drawers take the itch of the infection.
Streets have begun.
A lapel dog with goblet eyes of hot seccotine stamps on brass toes to where a black tree eats gravel; the snout at the urinal shiny as the chinpad of a violin. Labourers, their ringlets scented with blue grease, assemble at some work of coloured mud. A tradesman with the specific violence and well-being of butchers steps out for his attractive marble shop of quartered bodies; glazed cheeks of the very best meat, these have been costly feeders since he was a young soldier handsome as a tulip and badly finished at the hands.
In the distance, weather can be seen thrusting and gleaming. A diamond cutter has been over the metropolis. The atmosphere has spat once or twice on fish and magazines.
A sharp piece of blond sugar rattles in the mouth of a newsboy; he lubricates and passes with a humid bag of language. Infant snob, he adjusts precociously his printed jargon sheets to door and nameplate. With its ingenious crimes, the civilisation is comprehensive; it is not necessary to take the rest of the world seriously. But in order that they may be said to think deeply, people go to the trouble of believing their opinions even when they are alone.
And when she wakes, this London minx of seventeen, the whole city, the whole Imperial rubbish heap of wastrels, scullions, houris, fauns, and bedouin, will look to this pillow where a life so young, secret, and clean opens its eyes that it puts Mortality in doubt – for possibly forty seconds.
For his inebriated tread, the whole of Europe
With its great streets full of air and shade,
Its students and cocottes,
And traffic, roughly caked with blood,
Is not enough. The whole of Europe put to sleep
By music, coal-fires, snow, and café life,
And suffocated by hot fogs and poppies,
And rocked by lovers, like a chest of breath,
Is not, for the flâneur, drug strong enough.
A Europeâ¦motionless with dust and night,
As if a squid her bag had emptied,
As if a doormat had been shaken over it,
Is not mysterious enough for his infatuated tread!
The Furies are modern, they don't drive you they entice
With cafés, lovers, dusty streetsâ¦with the Apocalypse
âNot this one â but the
next
,' they hiss.
Fear is the blindworm in the brain,
In souls that keep house with a dagger
And love the cabbage-shade,
Hell's brainworm gnaws the harder.
When God unpurses all the grudges
Of the Universe on lives propped up on crutches
Like a pier â seas rock to music
For years, before they break it into matches,
And all the roughly-handled blue lumber
Of the storm licks lightning and barks blood
At lives on their rough crutches made of timber,
And the soul is larder to Hell's worm of mud,
Then in the cabbage-cold underground of brains
Afraid of life, Eternity already has begun
When the worm turns Creation into dust
And the World crawls away from under them.
But pinched in the thighs of low duties,
Subject to forces that make Asia drag her anchor,
Souls that are
great
are in their element
Despite the feasting canker.
Now for the night, liquid or bristling!
When owls make the ink squeak at my window
And my bedroom that can bone my body of its will,
Drinks out my brains on pillows.
Like a bather caught and skinned by rollers
I shall toss for an eternity in surf,
When the air-eating spirit in my nostrils
Is maddened by its heavy coat of earth!
Now for your rest, eyes where my passions lay
Waterlogged in flashing muscles all day
Well below the waterline and plotted in their acids,
Salt mortice sets your lids.
Baked on Hell's rubbish heap I go on smouldering
With my spirit at its bread of breath
Incapable of beating out the flames! And hatches
Are raised cautiously by all the sensesâ¦
O once you have taken this draught of black air
You would be glad of infinity to get your bearings!
Pass on – to the next child, tranquil rainfield,
For this is the anthem
Of oblivion’s white oxygen and bird warbling
In the abandoned rainfield
They sing who are disinherited.
And should the privileged fierce child deny
That all his rainfield hours
Belong to the Lord of oxygen and watershowers
And birds in deep rain resident,
Flutes of the clear firmament,
Then let him be dumbfounded by it
as a lie
;
Rainfields up to the knees
And hours that are ample and shimmering as seas
Are breath-taking and worthy
To be the work of Majesty.
And let him drown-bathe in the water firmament
That on webs rings a carillon
And birds that dress the breeze with wings, and own
They argue for the Lord of time
And white and icy oxygen.
I knew the poet’s rag-soft eyelid was the gutter’s fee
For the way down to life. I had
My lodgings in that quarter of the city
Like a cat’s ear full of cankered passages
Where November wraps the loiterer as spiders do their joints.
I was apprenticed to the moth bred from my clothes –
Gold sail, folded up! for with
Her tread, as Prince of footpads I could take
My own grave unawares; or when my head was baked
With Jewish magic – stalk the Archangel, Thy
insect
, He
Whose nest is thatched to ride the juice and fire of storms!
I was no merchant who for passport
Strokes a pearl. Only those who trade
Their rag-lid of bright lashes may business
In the Supernatural with the gutter for address.
My gutter – how you gleamed! Like dungeon floors which
Cobras have lubricated
Your time was kept in slimy yawns while you
Prized up the warm roof of the poor man’s shoe
And lacquered it with mire, that the grave might find
A way in to its meat – meanwhile the fool re-adored
His face green as a toad
Seen in a rippling crack of rain.
The grave: whose grunt lifts the latch, whose
Leavings found at night upon my flank were as black bread
And smoked like Satan’s droppings. O Heaven was greedy
At my nostril dark as a violet
To draw out her own breath from my brute
Freeze it with winter while I slept, and
With it bolt me to the ground in linen and diamond!
No powerful and gloomy city,
Which has rid itself of vermin,
Will admit to keeping
One of these disreputable pets
With amorous limbs of milk
Fond of nocturnal strolls
And the immortal dirt of London
Under the clear panes of its nails.
Except the rogue is hunted off the street
And hissed, cities lie undefended
And weak from centuries of boredom
At the mercy of the pest
Who lives by thieving like all vermin
And will take a heart out of its chest
By force, and handle it
So gently that it’s broken.
For brooding and embittered cities
Only slowly form their prejudice
Into an iceberg that is large enough
For ignorance to steer
From the bottom of a soul
By its rudder made of glass
Until the diamond smells blood and gores
The poet in the ribs in self-defence.
I swear that I would not go back
To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies
That built the Earth – there, under the heavy trees
With their bark that’s full of grocer’s spice,
Not for an hour – although my heart
Moves, thirstily, to drink the thought – would I
Go back to run my boat
On the brown rain that made it slippery,
I would not for a youth
Return to ignorance, and be the wildfowl
Thrown about by the dark water seasons
With an ink-storm of dark moods against my soul,
And no firm ground inside my breast,
Only the breath of God that stirs
Scent-kitchens of refreshing trees,
And the shabby green cartilage of play upon my knees.
With no hard earth inside my breast
To hold a Universe made out of breath,
Slippery as fish with their wet mortar made of mirrors
I laid a grip of glass upon my youth.
And not for the waterpools would I go back
To a Universe unreal as breath – although I use
The great muscle of my heart
To thirst like a drunkard for the scent-storm of the trees.
Society on the globe. At first in here:
The sweet sour larder with its shelf of muslin bonnets
Fragile as kites, the Ace of Hooligans
Broke in his mouth to mutiny, a drink
Delicious as rain. While under his lashes of corn
The dream in fluent opal swam against his eyes
Its waters sumptuously baited as the sea
With chiffon nettles. O his gosling panes!
His zoo of sighs hot as a madman’s breath,
Among blue smarting herbs and blue bee fur of rotten bread.
Outside: there was the ditch, the ideal boredom
In the brilliant thousands of a dose of thunderdrops;
The grass, smashed by the sky, which stews and tugs itself
On the muscular caramels of fast mud.
He, kneeling, with the moonlit sight of thieves,
Begged the ounce hog of the hedges she would seed
A touchy litter of her vermin commoners
That, gentle, he find syrup in his torn black mouth
Before the radiant traffic of space
Cut to pieces the palm of his hand.
Meadow giants, with hooks screwed to their bodies built of grass,
Their muzzles giving verbals of hot milk
Their ankles in the suck floor to a mucus climate,
These! When he raved for the globe’s gilt side,
Sun forests’ brute of fur, its blond swag head
Gorged at the warm beef of an earth hole, the red young stowed
Not twenty inches from the stupid boil of its nose.
The blue Male of the Equator, nude trunk
In war lacquers, throat groomed for hysteria.
While for divinity: the bronze Him roots out the white It.
Still a cipher, with a name sewn to his clothes,
Sexless as trout or chestnut eaten when the flesh is green,
He crossed the salt stare of the chart, its groping margins;
Land, clothed in steam, whose sea lisps to its pod of monsters;
Those plains where heaven thrums the blades grilled light as foil,
And tows the stallion, flash neck and nude-lipped head,
On burnt white hair. Whole skies shantung and music
In the tree drunk with his weather! the foreigner,
His merchandise rahat lacoum in fragrant drums
To trade the Irish who speak water on the syllable.
Beasts lit their eyes; the planet took in moth and dog.
Across the rubbishy beloved continent
Was drawn the circus with its tinsel hutch of midgets;
Fluorescent tournaments of ladylike brown animals,
He smelt man’s acid in their tame wool coats.
Hair as bright as butter scorched his boyhood chin,
A vein painted and roped against his thigh,
And his mouth felt her tongue. Returning home
His dazzled body hunted Africa
The red yes at the top of six flights of stairs.
The blind rubbers of the mouth of love!
The awakening with citron stare!
Morning: in a sty of tinted women.
She, on a quilt, bit roses; mammal pink.
He, a witch scab on his dream, left for infinity
While his soul peered out of his navel, hideous.
Streets: uttering bull smoke. Under a wall
Slum vegetable, its meat leg feeding.
His arrogance, these nerves which focus ecstasy –
Accelerations of the bankrupt mud.
The light; sashes and lustres. The crammed and rustling ball.
A dog rinsing its jaws in the sweet juice of a lake.
O thigh purring against raiment! O treacherous
No man’s land.