Old men who have studied
every leg show
in the city
Old men cut from touch
by the perfumed music--
polished or fleeced skulls
that stand before
the whole theatre
in silent attitudes
of attention,--
old men who have taken precedence
over young men
and even over dark-faced
husbands whose minds
are a street with arc-lights.
Solitary old men
for whom we find no excuses....
This is less savage than "Les Assis." His "Portrait of a Woman in Bed"
incites me to a comparison with Rimbaud's picture of an old actress in
her "loge." Not to Rimbaud's disadvantage. I don't know that any, save
the wholly initiated into the cult of anti-exoticism, would take
Williams' poem for an exotic, but there is no accounting for what may
occur in such cases.