Love Songs

Songs to Joannes

Mina Loy

1917

I

Spawn of Fantasies

Silting the appraisable

Pig Cupid his rosy snout

Rooting erotic garbage

“Once upon a time”

Pulls a weed white and star-topped

Among wild oats sewn in mucous-membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light

Eternity in a sky-rocket

Constellations in an ocean

Whose rivers run no fresher

Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places

I must live in my lantern

Trimming subliminal flicker

Virginal to the bellows

Of Experience

Coloured glass

II

The skin-sack

In which a wanton duality

Packed

All the completions of my infructuous impulses

Something the shape of a man

To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant

More of a clock-work mechanism

Running down against time

To which I am not paced

My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair

A God's door-mat

On the threshold of your mind

III

We might have coupled

In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment

Or broken flesh with one another

At the profane communion table

Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly

With the daily-news

Printed in blood on its wings

IV

Once in a mezzanino

The starry ceiling

Vaulted an unimaginable family

Bird-like abortions

With human throats

And Wisdom’s eyes

Who wore lamp-shade red dresses

And woolen hair

One bore a baby

In a padded porte-enfant

Tied with a sarsanet ribbon

To her goose’ s wings

But for the abominable shadows

I would have lived

Among their fearful furniture

To teach them to tell me their secrets

Before I guessed

—Sweeping the brood clean out

V

Midnight empties the street

Of all but us

Three

I am undecided which way back

To the left a boy

—One wing has been washed in the rain

The other will never be clean any more—

Pulling door-bells to remind

Those that are snug

To the right a haloed ascetic

Threading houses

Probes wounds for souls

—The poor can't wash in hot water—

And I don’t know which turning to take

Since you got home to yourself—first

VI

I know the Wire-Puller intimately

And if it were not for the people

On whom you keep one eye

You could look straight at me

And Time would be set back

VII

My pair of feet

Smack the flag-stones

That are something left over from your walking

The wind stuffs the scum of the white street

Into my lungs and my nostrils

Exhilarated birds

Prolonging flight into the night

Never reaching — — — — — — —

VIII

I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends

That lit your adolescent learning

— — — — — — — — — —

Behind God's eyes

There might

Be other lights

IX

When we lifted

Our eye-lids on Love

A cosmos

Of coloured voices

And laughing honey

And spermatozoa

At the core of Nothing

In the milk of the Moon

X

Shuttle-cock and battle-door

A little pink-love

And feathers are strewn

XI

Dear one at your mercy

Our Universe

Is only

A colorless onion

You derobe

Sheath by sheath

Remaining

A disheartening odour

About your nervy hands

XII

Voices break on the confine s of passion

Desire Suspicion Man Woman

Solve in the humid carnage

Flesh from flesh

Draws the inseparable delight

Kissing at gasps to catch it

Is it true

That I have set you apart

Inviolate in an utter crystallization

Of all the jolting of the crowd

Taught me willingly to live to share

Or are you

Only the other half

Of an ego's necessity

Scourging pride with compassion

To the shallow sound of dissonance

And boom of escaping breath

XIII

Come to me There is something

I have got to tell you and I can't tell

Something taking shape

Something that has a new name

A new dimension

A new use

A new illusion

It is ambient And it is in your eyes

Something shiny Something only for you

Something that I must not see

It is in my ears Something very resonant

Something that you must not hear

Something only for me

Let us be very jealous

Very suspicious

Very conservative

Very cruel .

Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations

Disorb inviolate egos

Where two or three are welded together

They shall become god

— — — — — — —

Oh that's right

Keep away from me Please give me a push

Don't let me understand you Don't realise me

Or we might tumble together

Depersonalized

Identical

Into the terrific Nirvana

Me you — you — me

XIV

Today

Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible

To you

I bring the nascent virginity of

—Myself for the moment

No love or the other thing

Only the impact of lighted bodies

Knocking sparks off each other

In chaos

XV

Seldom Trying for Love

Fantasy dealt them out as gods

Two or three men looked only human

But you alone

Superhuman apparently

I had to be caught in the weak eddy

Of your drivelling humanity

To love you most

XVI

We might have lived together

In the lights of the Arno

Or gone apple stealing under the sea

Or played

Hide and seek in love and cob-webs

And a lullaby on a tin-pan

And talked till there were no more tongues

To talk with

And never have known any better

XVII

I don't care

Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to

Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride

Or what would look at me

If the shutters were not shut

Red a warm colour on the battle-field

Heavy on my knees as a counterpane

Count counter

I counted the fringe of the towel

Till two tassels clinging together

Let the square room fall away

From a round vacuum

Dilating with my breath

XVIII

Out of the severing

Of hill from hill

The interim

Of star from star

The nascent

Static

Of night

XIX

Nothing so conserving

As cool cleaving

Note of the Q H U

Clear carving

Breath-giving

Pollen smelling

Space

White telling

Of slaking

Drinkable

Through fingers

Running water

Grass haulms

Grow to

Leading astray

Of fireflies

Aerial quadrille

Bouncing

Off one another

Again conjoining

In recaptured pulses

Of light

You too

Had something

At that time

Of a green-lit glow-worm

— — — — — — —

Yet slowly drenched

To raylessness

In rain

XX

Let Joy go solace-winged

To flutter whom she may concern

XXI

I store up nights against you

Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares

— — — — — — — — — —

Stack noons

Curled to the solitaire

Core of the

Sun

XXII

Green things grow

Salads

For the cerebral

Forager's revival

Upon bossed bellies

Of mountains

Rolling in the sun

And flowered flummery

Breaks

To my silly shoes

In ways without you

I go

Gracelessly

As things go.

XXIII

Laughter in solution

Stars in a stare

Irredeemable pledges

Of pubescent consummations

Rot

To the recurrent moon

Bleach

To the pure white

Wickedness of pain

XXIV

The procreative truth of Me

Petered out

In pestilent

Tear drops

Little lusts and lucidities

And prayerful lies

Muddled with the heinous acerbity

Of your street-corner smile

XXV

Licking the Arno

The little rosy

Tongue of Dawn

Interferes with our eyelashes

— — — — — — — —

We twiddle to it

Round and round

Faster

And turn into machines

Till the sun

Subsides in shining

Melts some of us

Into abysmal pigeon-holes

Passion has bored

In warmth

Some few of us

Grow to the level of cool plains

Cutting our foot-hold

With steel eyes

XXVI

Shedding our petty pruderies

From slit eyes

We sidle up To Nature

— — — that irate pornographist

XXVII

Nucleus Nothing

Inconceivable concept

Insentient repose

The hands of races

Drop off from

Immodifiable plastic

The contents

Of our ephemeral conjunction

In aloofness from Much

Flowed to approachment of — — — —

NOTHING

There was a man and a woman

In the way

While the Irresolvable

Rubbed with our daily deaths

Impossible eyes

XXVIII

The steps go up for ever

And they are white

And the first step is the last white

Forever

Coloured conclusions

Smelt to synthetic

Whiteness

Of my

Emergence

And I am burnt quite white

In the climacteric

Withdrawal of your sun

And wills and words all white

Suffuse

Illimitable monotone

White where there is nothing to see

But a white towel

Wipes the cymophanous sweat

—Mist rise of living—

From your

Etiolate body

And the white dawn

Of your New Day

Shuts down on me

Unthinkable that white over there

— — — Is smoke from your house

XXIX

Evolution fall foul of

Sexual equality

Prettily miscalculate

Similitude

Unnatural selection

Breed such sons and daughters

As shall jibber at each other

Uninterpretable cryptonyms

Under the moon

Give them some way of braying brassily

For carressive calling

Or to homophonous hiccoughs

Transpose the laugh

Let them suppose that tears

Are snowdrops or molasses

Or anything

Than human insufficiencies

Begging dorsal vertebrae

Let meeting be the turning

To the antipodean

And Form a blurr

Anything

Than seduce them

To the one

As simple satisfaction

For the other

Let them clash together

From their incognitoes

In seismic orgasm

For far further

Differentiation

Rather than watch

Own-self distortion

Wince in the alien ego

XXX

In some

Prenatal plagiarism

Foetal buffoons

Caught tricks

— — — — —

From archetypal pantomime

Stringing emotions

Looped aloft

— — — —

For the blind eyes

That Nature knows us with

And the most of Nature is green

— — — — — — — — — —

What guaranty

For the proto-form

We fumble

Our souvenir ethics to

— — — — — — —

XXXI

Crucifixion

Of a busy-body

Longing to interfere so

With the intimacies

Of your insolent isolation

Crucifixion

Of an illegal ego's

Eclosion

On your equilibrium

Caryatid of an idea

Crucifixion

Wracked arms

Index extremities

In vacuum

To the unbroken fall

XXXII

The moon is cold

Joannes

Where the Mediterranean — — — — —

XXXIII

The prig of passion — — — —

To your professorial paucity

Proto-plasm was raving mad

Evolving us — — —

XXXIV

Love — — —the preeminent litterateur