I
wonder if all life might not be unlike anno 1910,
four
years before a war, when Howard's End 
propended
toward pronouncements about biases
and
social class, and Paris boasted (on December 
Third)
a neon sign - first in the world - appended 
to
the glass of its new Motor Show - attended by 
the
rolling roto-motions of a slew of hips of smartly 
turned-out
girls which sent soft tiny seismic shocks 
up
through their coiffured curls, and down their 
corsets
to their furling street-length skirts. I wonder 
if
all life is not unlike the tightly buttoned suits 
and
blinding white stiff-collared shirts of men just 
at
the end of the Edwardians: symbolic gallant 
phallic
swordsmen striding to and fro like random 
posses
of spermatozoa seeking to invade an egg hid
in
the mysteries above some lovely woman’s leg. 
I
wonder if all life is not unlike the bloom of the erotic 
in
a room alone with Henry James imagining the voice
of
that young man he’s sure will call him very soon on 
his
new-fangled phone, to dissipate the terrible mute 
gloom
of a December afternoon in Rye: heart-ache 
over
tea-cake and a sigh. I wonder if you can't make 
life
into whatever you've a liking to. Today the early 
‘teens
of Europe please and tease. I get no quarrel
from my referent: life never argues, it agrees.
.

 

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