1
Baaaa! Ba-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! _Bebe esa purga._ It is the goats of
Santo Domingo talking. _Bebe esa purga!_ Bebeesapurga! And the answer is:
_Yo no lo quiero beber!_ Yonoloquierobeber!
* * * * *
_It is nearly pure luck that gets the mind turned inside out in a work
of art. There is nothing more difficult than to write a poem. It is
something of a matter of slight of hand. The poets of the T’ang dynasty
or of the golden age in Greece or even the Elizabethans: it’s a kind of
alchemy of form, a deft bottling of a fermenting language. Take Dante
and his Tuscan dialect— It’s a matter of position. The empty form drops
from a cloud, like a gourd from a vine; into it the poet packs his
phallus-like argument._
2
The red huckleberry bushes running miraculously along the ground among
the trees everywhere, except where the land’s tilled, these keep
her from that tiredness the earth’s touch lays up under the soles
of feet. She runs beyond the wood follows the swiftest along the
roads laughing among the birch clusters her face in the yellow
leaves the curls before her eyes her mouth half open. This is a
person in particular there where they have her—and I have only a wraith
in the birch trees.
* * * * *
_It is not the lusty bodies of the nearly naked girls in the shows about
town, nor the blare of the popular tunes that make money for the manager.
The girls can be procured rather more easily in other ways and the music
is dirt cheap. It is that this meat is savored with a strangeness which
never looses its fresh taste to generation after generation, either of
dancers or those who watch. It is beauty escaping, spinning up over the
heads, blown out at the overtaxed vents by the electric fans._
3
* * * * *
_In many poor and sentimental households it is a custom to have cheap
prints in glass frames upon the walls. These are of all sorts and many
sizes and may be found in any room from the kitchen to the toilet. The
drawing is always of the worst and the colors, not gaudy but almost
always of faint indeterminate tints, are infirm. Yet a delicate accuracy
exists between these prints and the environment which breeds them. But
as if to intensify this relationship words are added. There will be a
“sentiment” as it is called, a rhyme, which the picture illuminates. Many
of these pertain to love. This is well enough when the bed is new and the
young couple spend the long winter nights there in delightful seclusion.
But childbirth follows in its time and a motto still hangs above the bed.
It is only then that the full ironical meaning of these prints leaves the
paper and the frame and starting through the glass takes undisputed sway
over the household._