The 42nd Parallel

The Camera Eye (25)

those spring nights the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round the curved tracks of Harvard Square dust hangs in the powdery arclight glare allnight till dawn can’t sleep

haven’t got the nerve to break out of the bellglass

four years under the ethercone breathe deep gently now that’s the way be a good boy one two three four five six get A’s in some courses but don’t be a grind be interested in literature but remain a gentleman don’t be seen with Jews or socialists

and all the pleasant contacts will be useful in Later Life say hello pleasantly to everybody crossing the yard

sit looking out into the twilight of the pleasantest four years of your life

grow cold with culture like a cup of tea forgotten between an incenseburner and a volume of Oscar Wilde cold and not strong like a claret lemonade drunk at a Pop Concert in Symphony Hall

four years I didn’t know you could do what you Michaelangelo wanted say

Marx

to all

the professors with a small Swift break all the Greenoughs in the shooting gallery

but tossed with eyes smarting all the spring night reading The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus and went mad listening to the streetcarwheels screech grinding in a rattle of loose trucks round Harvard Square and the trains crying across the saltmarshes and the rumbling siren of a steamboat leaving dock and the blue peter flying and millworkers marching with a red brass band through the streets of Lawrence Massachusetts

it was like the Magdeburg spheres the pressure outside sustained the vacuum within

and I hadn’t the nerve

to jump up and walk out of doors and tell them all to

go take a flying

Rimbaud

at the moon