Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks Read Free Book Online

with winter while I slept, and
    With it bolt me to the ground in linen and diamond!

Poet and Iceberg
    No powerful and gloomy city,
    Which has rid itself of vermin,
    Will admit to keeping
    One of these disreputable pets
    With amorous limbs of milk
    Fond of nocturnal strolls
    And the immortal dirt of London
    Under the clear panes of its nails.
    Except the rogue is hunted off the street
    And hissed, cities lie undefended
    And weak from centuries of boredom
    At the mercy of the pest
    Who lives by thieving like all vermin
    And will take a heart out of its chest
    By force, and handle it
    So gently that it’s broken.
    For brooding and embittered cities
    Only slowly form their prejudice
    Into an iceberg that is large enough
    For ignorance to steer
    From the bottom of a soul
    By its rudder made of glass
    Until the diamond smells blood and gores
    The poet in the ribs in self-defence.

Oath
    I swear that I would not go back
    To pole the glass fishpools where the rough breath lies
    That built the Earth – there, under the heavy trees
    With their bark that’s full of grocer’s spice,
    Not for an hour – although my heart
    Moves, thirstily, to drink the thought – would I
    Go back to run my boat
    On the brown rain that made it slippery,
    I would not for a youth
    Return to ignorance, and be the wildfowl
    Thrown about by the dark water seasons
    With an ink-storm of dark moods against my soul,
    And no firm ground inside my breast,
    Only the breath of God that stirs
    Scent-kitchens of refreshing trees,
    And the shabby green cartilage of play upon my knees.
    With no hard earth inside my breast
    To hold a Universe made out of breath,
    Slippery as fish with their wet mortar made of mirrors
    I laid a grip of glass upon my youth.
    And not for the waterpools would I go back
    To a Universe unreal as breath – although I use
    The great muscle of my heart
    To thirst like a drunkard for the scent-storm of the trees.

Ace of Hooligans
    Society on the globe. At first in here:
    The sweet sour larder with its shelf of muslin bonnets
    Fragile as kites, the Ace of Hooligans
    Broke in his mouth to mutiny, a drink
    Delicious as rain. While under his lashes of corn
    The dream in fluent opal swam against his eyes
    Its waters sumptuously baited as the sea
    With chiffon nettles. O his gosling panes!
    His zoo of sighs hot as a madman’s breath,
    Among blue smarting herbs and blue bee fur of rotten bread.
    Outside: there was the ditch, the ideal boredom
    In the brilliant thousands of a dose of thunderdrops;
    The grass, smashed by the sky, which stews and tugs itself
    On the muscular caramels of fast mud.
    He, kneeling, with the moonlit sight of thieves,
    Begged the ounce hog of the hedges she would seed
    A touchy litter of her vermin commoners
    That, gentle, he find syrup in his torn black mouth
    Before the radiant traffic of space
    Cut to pieces the palm of his hand.
    Meadow giants, with hooks screwed to their bodies built of grass,
    Their muzzles giving verbals of hot milk
    Their ankles in the suck floor to a mucus climate,
    These! When he raved for the globe’s gilt side,
    Sun forests’ brute of fur, its blond swag head
    Gorged at the warm beef of an earth hole, the red young stowed
    Not twenty inches from the stupid boil of its nose.
    The blue Male of the Equator, nude trunk
    In war lacquers, throat groomed for hysteria.
    While for divinity: the bronze Him roots out the white It.
    Still a cipher, with a name sewn to his clothes,
    Sexless as trout or chestnut eaten when the flesh is green,
    He crossed the salt stare of the chart, its groping margins;
    Land, clothed in steam, whose sea lisps to its pod of monsters;
    Those plains where heaven thrums the blades grilled light as foil,
    And tows the stallion, flash neck and nude-lipped head,
    On burnt white hair. Whole skies shantung and music
    In the tree drunk with his weather! the foreigner,
    His merchandise rahat lacoum in fragrant drums
    To trade the Irish who speak water on the syllable.
    Beasts lit