1919

The Camera Eye (28)

when the telegram came that she was dying (the streetcarwheels screeched round the bellglass like all the pencils on all the slates in all the schools) walking around Fresh Pond the smell of puddlewater willowbuds in the raw wind shrieking streecarwheels rattling on loose trucks through the Boston suburbs grief isnt a uniform and go shock the Booch and drink wine for supper at the Lenox before catching the Federal

I’m so tired of violets

Take them all away

when the telegram came that she was dying the bellglass cracked in a screech of slate pencils (have you ever never been able to sleep for a week in April?) and He met me in the grey trainshed my eyes were stinging with vermillion bronze and chromegreen inks that oozed from the spinning April hills His moustaches were white the tired droop of an old man’s cheeks She’s gone Jack grief isn’t a uniform and the in the parlor the waxen odor of lilies in the parlor (He and I we must bury the uniform of grief)

then the riversmell the shimmering Potomac reaches the little choppysilver waves at Indian Head there were mockingbirds in the graveyard and the roadsides steamed with spring April enough to shock the world

when the cable came that He was dead I walked through the streets full of fiveoclock Madrid seething with twilight in shivered cubes of aguardiente redwine gaslampgreen sunsetpink tileochre eyes lips red cheeks brown pillar of the throat climbed on the night train at the Norte station without knowing why

I’m so tired of violets

Take them all away

the shattered iridescent bellglass the carefully copied busts the architectural details the grammar of styles

it was the end of that book and I left the Oxford poets in the little noisy room that smelt of stale oliveoil in the Pension Boston Ahora Now Maintenant Vita Nuova but we

who had heard Copey’s beautiful reading voice and read the handsomely bound books and breathed deep (breathe deep one two three four) of the waxwork lilies and the artificial parmaviolet scent under the ethercone and sat breakfasting in the library where the bust was of Octavius

were now dead at the cableoffice

on the rumblebumping wooden bench on the train slamming through midnight climbing up from the steerage to get a whiff of Atlantic on the lunging steamship (the ovalfaced Swiss girl and her husband were my friends) she had slightly popeyes and a little gruff way of saying Zut alors and throwing us a little smile a fish to a sealion that warmed our darkness when the immigration officer came for her passport he couldn’t send her to Ellis Island la grippe espagnole she was dead

washing those windows

K.P.

cleaning the sparkplugs with a pocketknife

A. W. O. L.

grinding the American Beauty roses to dust in that whore’s bed (the foggy night flamed with proclamations of the League of the Rights of Man) the almond smell of high explosives sending singing éclats through the sweetish puking grandiloquence of the rotting dead

tomorrow I hoped would be the first day of the first month of the first year