Saturday, December 31, 2016

Life, and Time


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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