Love Songs
By Mina Loy
I
Spawn of fantasies
Sifting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed white star-topped
Among wild oats sown 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
Colored glass.
II
At your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You derobe
Sheath by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your nervy hands
III
Night
Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares
---------------------------------------------
Noon
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun
IV
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 caressive calling
Or to homophonous hiccoughs
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiences
Begging dorsal vertebrae
Let meeting be the turning
To the antipodean
And Form a blur
Anything
Than to seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other
V
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink-love
And feathers are strewn
VI
Let Joy go solace-winged
To flutter whom she may concern
VII
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 sarsenet 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
VIII
Midnight empties the street
--- --- --- To the left a boy
--- One wing has been washed in 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 ---
IX
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
X
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 most of Nature is green
--- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- --- ---
XI
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager's revival
And flowered flummery
Upon bossed bellies
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
XII
Shedding our petty pruderies
From slit eyes
We sidle up
To Nature
--- --- --- that irate pornographist
XIII
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching --- --- --- --- ------ --- ---
