A Pushcart at the Curb Part 10

Shall I tear down the pinkish curtains smash the imitation ivory keyboard that you may pluck with bare fingers on the strings?

I sit cramped in my chair.

Futility tumbles everlastingly like great flabby snowflakes about me.

Were they in your eyes, or mine the tattered mists about the mountains and the pitiless grey sea?

_1919_

ON FOREIGN TRAVEL

I

Grey riverbanks in the dusk Melting away into mist A hard breeze sharp off the sea The ship's screws lunge and throb And the voices of sailors singing.

O I have come wandering Out of the dust of many lands Ears by all tongues jangled Feet worn by all arduous ways-- O the voices of sailors singing.

What nostalgia of sea And free new-scented s.p.a.ces dreams of towns vermillion-gated Must be in their blood as in mine That the sailors long so in singing.

Churned water marbled astern Grey riverbanks in the dusk Melting away into mist And a shrill wind hard off the sea.

O the voices of sailors singing.

II

Padding lunge of a camel's stride turning the sharp purple flints. A man sings:

Breast deep in the dawn a queen of the east; the woolen folds of her robe hang white and straight as the hard marble columns of the temple of Jove.

A thousand days the pebbles have scuttled under the great pads of my camels.

A thousands days like bite of sour apples have been bitter with desire in my mouth.

A thousand days of cramped legs flecked with green s...o...b..r of dromedaries.

At the crest of the road that transfixes the sun she awaits me lean with desire with muscles tightened by these thousand days pallid with dust sinewy naked before her.

Padding lunge of a camel's stride over the flint-strewn hills. A man sings:

I have heard men sing songs of how in scarlet pools in the west in purpurate mist that bursts from the sun trodden like a grape under the feet of darkness a woman with great b.r.e.a.s.t.s thighs white like wintry mountains bathes her nakedness.

I have lain biting my cheeks many nights with ears murmurous with the songs of these strange men.

My arms have stung as if burned by the touch of red ants with anguish to circle strokingly her bulging smooth body.

My blood has soured to gall.

The ten toes of my feet are hard as buzzards' claws from the stones of roads, from clambering cold rockfaces of hills.

For uncountable days' journeys jouncing on the humps of camels iron horizons have swayed like the rail of a ship at sea mountains have tossed like wine shaken hard in a wine cup.

I have heard men sing songs of the scarlet pools of the sunset.

Two men, bundled pyramids of brown abreast, bow to the long slouch of their slowstriding camels.

Shrilly the yellow man sings:

In the courts of Han green fowls with carmine tails peck at the yellow grain court ladies scatter with tiny ivory hands, the tails of the fowls droop with multiple elegance over the wan blue stones as the hands of courtladies droop on the goldstiffened silk of their angular flower-embroidered dresses.

In the courts of Han little hairy dogs are taught to bark twice at the mention of the name of Confucius.

The twittering of the women that hop like silly birds through the courts of Han became sharp like little pins in my ears, their hands in my hands rigid like small ivory scoops to scoop up mustard with when I had heard the songs of the western pools where the great queen is throned on a purple throne in whose vast encompa.s.sing arms all bitter twigs of desire burst into scarlet bloom.

Padding lunge of the camel's stride over flint-strewn hills. The brown man sings:

On the house-enc.u.mbered hills of great marble Rome no man has ever counted the columns no man has ever counted the statues no man has ever counted the laws sharply inscribed in plain writing on tablets of green bronze.

At brightly lit tables in a great brick basilica seven hundred literate slaves copy on rolls of thin parchment adorned by seals and purple bows the taut philosophical epigrams announced by the emperor each morning while taking his bath.

A day of rain and roaring gutters the wine-reeking words of a drunken man who clenched about me hard-muscled arms and whispered with moist lips against my ear filled me with smell and taste of spices with harsh panting need to seek out the great calm implacable queen of the east who erect against sunrise holds in the folds of her woolen robe all knowledge of delight against whose hard white flesh my flesh will sear to cinders in a last sheer flame.

Among the house-enc.u.mbered hills of great marble Rome I could no longer read the laws inscribed on tablets of green bronze.

The maxims of the emperor's philosophy were croaking of toads in my ears.

A day of rain and roaring gutters the wine-reeking words of a drunken man: ... breast deep in the dawn a queen of the east.

The camels growl and stretch out their necks, their slack lips jiggle as they trot towards a water hole in a pebbly torrent bed.

The riders pile dry twigs for a fire and gird up their long gowns to warm at the flame their lean galled legs.

Says the yellow man:

You have seen her in the west?

Says the brown man:

Hills and valleys stony roads.

In the towns the bright eyes of women looking out from lattices.

Camps in the desert where men pa.s.sed the time of day where were embers of fires and greenish piles of camel-dung.

You have seen her in the east?

Says the yellow man:

Only red mountains and bare plains, the blue smoke of villages at evening, brown girls bathing along banks of streams.

I have slept with no woman only my dream.

Says the brown man:

I have looked in no woman's eyes only stared along eastward roads.