Songs to Joannes, by Mina
I
Spawn of Fantasies
the appraisable
Pig his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
“Once upon a time”
Pulls a weed
Among sewn in mucous-membrane
I would an eye in a
Eternity in a
in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
These are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming flicker
Virginal to the
Of Experience
Coloured glass
II
The skin-sack
In which a duality
Packed
All the completions of my impulses
Something the shape of a man
To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant
More of a clock-work mechanism
Running down against time
To which I am not paced
My finger-tips are numb from your hair
A God’s
On the threshold of your mind
III
We might have coupled
In the of a moment
Or with one another
At the profane
Where wine is spill’t on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the
Printed in blood on its wings
IV
Once in a
The starry ceiling
Vaulted an unimaginable family
Bird-like
With human throats
A n d Wisdom’s eyes
Who wore lamp-shade red dresses
And woolen hair
One bore a baby
In a padded
Tied with a ribbon
To her goose’s wings
But for the
I would have lived
Among their fearful
To teach them to tell me their secrets
Before I guessed
—Sweeping the clean out
V
Midnight empties the street
Of all but us
Three
I am undecided which way back
To the left a boy
—One wing has been washed in the rain
The other will never be clean any more—
Pulling door-bells to remind
Those that are snug
To the right a halœd
houses
Probes wounds for souls
—The poor can’t wash in hot water—
And I don’t know which turning to take
Since you got home to yourself—first
VI
I know the
And if it were not for the people
On whom you keep one eye
You could look straight at me
And Time would be set back
VII
My pair of feet
Smack the
That are something left over from your walking
The wind stuffs the scum of the white street
Into my lungs and my nostrils
Exhilarated birds
Prolonging flight into the night
Never reaching — — — — — — —
VIII
I am the jealous
That lit your adolescent learning
— — — — — — — — — —
Behind God’s eyes
There might
Be other lights
IX
When we lifted
Our eye-lids on Love
A cosmos
Of coloured voices
And laughing honey
And
At the core of Nothing
In the milk of the Moon
X
andA little pink-love
And feathers are strewn
XI
Dear one at your mercy
Our Universe
Is only
A colorless onion
You
by sheath
Remaining
A disheartening odour
About your hands
XII
Voices break on the confines of passion
Desire Suspicion Man Woman
Solve in the
Flesh from flesh
Draws the inseparable delight
Kissing at gasps to catch it
Is it true
That I have set you apart
in an utter
Of all the jolting of the crowd
Taught me willingly to live to share
Or are you
Only the other half
Of an ego’s necessity
pride with compassion
To the shallow sound of
And of escaping breath
XIII
Come to me There is something
I have got to tell you and I can’t tell
Something taking shape
Something that has a new name
A new
A new use
A new
It is
Something shiny Something only for you
Something that I must not see
It is in my ears Something very
Something that you must not hear
Something only for me
Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might make an end of the of aspirations
egos
Where two or three are
They shall become god
— — — — — — —
Oh that’s right
Keep away from me Please give me a push
Don’t let me understand you Don’t me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific
Me you — you — me
XIV
Today
Everlasting passing
To you
I bring the virginity of
—Myself for the moment
No love or
Only the impact of lighted bodies
Knocking sparks off each other
In
XV
Seldom Trying for Love
Fantasy dealt them out as gods
Two or three men looked only human
But you alone
Superhuman apparently
I had to be caught in the weak
Of your humanity
To love you most
XVI
We might have lived together
In the lights of the
Or gone apple stealing under the sea
Or played
Hide and seek in love and cob-webs
And a lullaby on a
And talked till there were no more
To talk with
And never have known any better
XVII
I don’t care
Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to
Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride
Or what would look at me
If the shutters were not shut
Red a warm colour on the battle-field
Heavy on my knees as a
I counted the fringe of the towel
Till two tassels clinging together
Let the square room fall away
From a round
with my breath
XVIII
Out of the
Of hill from hill
The
Of star from star
The
Of night
XIX
Nothing so conserving
As cool
Note of the
Clear carving
Breath-giving
Pollen smelling
Space
White telling
Of
Drinkable
Through fingers
Running water
Grass
Grow to
Leading astray
Of fireflies
Aerial
Bouncing
Off one another
Again
In recaptured
Of light
You too
Had something
At that time
Of a green-lit glow-worm
— — — — — — —
Yet slowly drenched
To
In rain
XX
Let Joy go solace-winged
To whom she may concern
XXI
I store up nights against you
Heavy with shut-flower’s nightmares
— — — — — — — — — —
Stack noons
Curled to the solitaire
Core of the
Sun
XXII
Green things grow
Salads
For the cerebral
Forager’s revival
Upon
Of mountains
Rolling in the sun
And
Breaks
To my silly shoes
In ways without you
I go
Gracelessly
As things go
XXIII
Laughter in
Stars in a stare
Irredeemable pledges
Of
Rot
To the moon
Bleach
To the pure white
Wickedness of pain
XXIV
The
In
Tear drops
Little lusts and
And prayerful lies
with the
Of your smile
XXV
Licking the Arno
The little rosy
Tongue of Dawn
Interferes with our eyelashes
— — — — — — — —
We to it
Round and round
Faster
And turn into machines
Till the sun
Subsides in shining
Melts some of us
Into abysmal
Passion has
In warmth
Some few of us
Grow to the level of cool plains
Cutting our
With steel eyes
XXVI
Shedding our petty
From slit eyes
W
To Nature
— — — that irate
XXVII
NothingInconceivable concept
Insentient repose
The hands of races
Drop off from
Immodifiable
The contents
Of our
In aloofness from Much
Flowed to of — — — —
NOTHING
There was a man and a woman
While the Irresolvable
Rubbed with our daily deaths
Impossible eyes
XXVIII
The steps go up for ever
And they are white
And the first step is the last white
Forever
Coloured conclusions
Smelt to synthetic
Whiteness
Of my
Emergence
And I am burnt quite white
In the
Withdrawal of your sun
And wills and words all white
Suffuse
Illimitable monotone
White where there is nothing to see
But a white towel
Wipes the sweat
—Mist rise of living—
From your
body
And the white dawn
Of your New Day
Shuts down on me
Unthinkable that white over there
— — — Is smoke from your house
XXIX
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall at each other
Uninterpretable
Under the moon
Give them some way of braying brassily
For caressive calling
Or to homophonous
Transpose the laugh
Let them suppose that tears
Are snowdrops or molasses
Or anything
Than human insufficiencies
Begging vertebræ
Let meeting be the turning
To the
And Form a
Anything
Than seduce them
To the one
As simple satisfaction
For the other
Let them clash together
From their incognitœs
In orgasm
For far further
Differentiation
Rather than watch
Own-self distortion
Wince in the
XXX
In some
Prenatal
Caught tricks
— — — — —
From
Stringing emotions
Looped aloft
— — — —
For the blind eyes
That Nature knows us with
And the most of Nature is green
— — — — — — — — — —
XXXI
Of a
Longing to interfere so
With the intimacies
Of your insolent isolation
Crucifixion
Of an illegal ego’s
On your equilibrium
of an idea
Crucifixion
arms
Index
In
To the unbroken fall
XXXII
The moon is cold
Where the Mediterranean — — — — —
XXXIII
The
To your professorial
Evolving us — — —
XXXIV
Love — — — the