Who? A pale face surrounded by heavy odorous furs. Her
movements are shy and nervous. She uses quizzing-glasses.
'Yes': a brief syllable. A brief laugh. A brief beat of the eyelids.


Cobweb handwriting, traced long and fine with quiet disdain
and resignation: a young person of quality.
I launch forth on an easy wave of tepid speech: Swedenborg.
the pseudo-Areopagite, 'Miguel de Molinos, Joachim
Abbas. The wave is spent. Her classmate, retwisting her
twisted body, purrs in boneless Viennese Italian: 'Che coltura!'
The long eyelids beat and lift: a burning needleprick stings and
quivers in the velvet.


High heels, clack hollow on the resonant stone stairs. Wintry
air in the castle, gibbeted coats of mail, rude iron sconces over
the windings of the winding turret stairs. Tapping clacking
heels, a high and hollow noise. There is one below would
speak with your ladyship.


She never blows her nose. A form of speech: the lesser for the
greater.

Rounded and ripened: rounded by the lathe of intermarriage and ripened in the forcing-house of the seclusion of her race.


A ricefield near Vercelli under creamy summer haze. The wings
of her drooping hat shadow her false smile. Shadows streak
her falsely smiling face, smitten by the hot creamy light, grey
wheyhued shadows under the jawbones, streaks of eggyolk
yellow on the moistened brow, rancid yellow humour
lurking within the softened pulp of the eyes.

A flower given by her to my daughter. Frail gift, frail giver,
frail blue-veined child.


Padua far beyond the sea. The silent middle age, night,
darkness of history sleep in the Piazza delle Erde under the
moon. The city sleeps. Under the arches in the dark streets near
the river the whores' eyes spy out for fornicators. Cinque
servizi per cinque franchi. A dark wave of verse, again and
again and again.

Mine eyes fail in darkness, mine eyes fail,
Mine eyes fail in darkness, love.

Again. No-more. Dark love, dark longing. No more. Darkness.
Twilight, Crossing the piazza. Grey eve lowering on wide
sagegreen pasturelands, shedding silently dusk and dew. She
follows her mother with ungainly grace, the mare leading her
filly foal. Grey twilight moulds softly-the slim and shapely
haunches, the meek supple tendonous neck, the fine-boned
skull. Eve, peace, the dusk of wonder Hillo! Ostler!
Hilloho!

Papa and the girls sliding downhill, astride of a toboggan: the
Grand Turk and his harem. Tightly capped and jacketted,
boots laced in deft crisscross over the flesh-warmed tongue;
the short skirt taut from the round knobs of the knees. A white
flash: a flake, a snowflake:

'And when she next doth ride abroad
May I be there to see!'

I rush out of the tobacco-shop and call her name. She turns and
halts to hear my jumbled words of lessons, hours, lessons,
hours: and slowly her pale cheeks are flushed with a kindling
opal light. Nay, nay, be not afraid!


Mio padre: she does the simplest acts with distinction. 'Unde
derivatur? Mia figia ha una grandissima amrnirazione per it
suo maestro inglese'. The old man's face, handsome, flushed,
with strongly Jewish features and long white whiskers, turns
towards me as we walk down the hill together. O! Perfectly
said: courtesy, benevolence, curiosity, trust, suspicion, naturalness, helplessness of age, confidence, frankness, urbanity,
sincerity, warning, pathos, compassion: a perfect blend. Ignatius
Loyola, make haste to help me!

This heart is sore and sad. Crossed in love?

Long lewdly leering lips: dark-blooded molluscs


Moving mists on the hill as I look upward from night and mud.
Hanging mists over the damp trees. A light in the upper room.,
She is dressing to go to the play. There are ghosts in the mirror
..... Candles! Candles!


'A gentle creature'. At midnight, after music, all the way up the
via San Michele, these words were spoken softly. Easy now,
Jamesy! Did you never walk the streets of Dublin at night
sobbing another name?


Corpses of Jews lie about me rotting in the mould of their holy
field. .Here is the tomb of her people, black stone, silence
without hope ..... Pimply Meissel brought me here. He is
beyond those trees standing with covered head at the grave of
his suicide wife, wondering how the woman who slept in his
bed has come to this end ..... The tomb of her people and
hers: black stone, silence without hope: and all is ready. Do
not die!


She raises her arms in an effort to hook at the nape of her neck
a gown of black veiling. She cannot: no, she cannot. She moves
backwards towards me mutely. I raise my arms to help her: her
arms fall. I hold the websoft edges of her gown and drawing
them out to hook them I see through the opening of the black
veil,her lithe body sheathed in an orange shift. It slips its
ribbons of moorings at her shoulders and falls slowly: a lithe
smooth naked body shimmering with-silvery scales. It slips
slowly over the slender buttocks of smooth polished silver and
over their furrow, a tarnished silver shadow .... Fingers, cold
and calm and moving .... A touch, a touch.



Small witless helpless and thin breath. But bend and hear: a
voice. A sparrow under the wheels of Juggernaut, shaking
shaker of the earth. Please, mister God, big mister God!
Goodbye, big world! .......Aber das ist eine Scbueinerei!



Great bows on her slim bronze shoes: spurs of a pampered
fowl.
The lady goes apace, apace, apace' ..... Pure air on the
upland road. Trieste is waking rawly: raw sunlight over its
huddled browntiled roofs, testudoform; a multitude of prostratebugs
await a national deliverance. Belluouro rises fnom the bed of his wife's lover's wife: the busy housewife is astir, sloe-eyed, a saucer of acetic acid in her hand! ..... Pure air and silence on the upland road: and hoofs. A girl on horseback. Hedda! Hedda Gabler!



The sellers offer on their altars the first fruits: green-flecked
lemons, jewelled cherries, shameful peaches with torn
leaves. The carriage passes through the lane of canvas stalls,
its wheel-spokes spinning in the glare. Make way! Her father
and his son sit in the carriage. They have owls' eyes and owls'
wisdom. Owlish wisdom stares.from their eyes brooding upon
the lore of their 'Summa contra Gentiles'.



She thinks the Italian gentlemen were right to haul Ettore
Albini, the critic of the Secolo, from the stalls because he did
not stand up when the band played the Royal March. She
heard that at supper. Ay. They love their country when they
are quite sure which country it is.



She listens: virgin most prudent.



A skirt caught back by her sudden moving knee; a white lace
edging of an underskirt lifted unduly; a leg-stretched web of
stocking. Si pol?



I play lightly, softly singing, John Dowland's languid song.
Loth to depart: I too am loth to go. That age is here and now.
Here, opening from the darkness of desire, are eyes that dim
the breaking East, their shimmer the shimmer of the scum that
mantles the cesspool of the court of slobbering James.Here are
wines all ambered, dying faIlings of sweet airs, the proud
pavan, kind gentlewomen wooing from their balconies with
sucking mouths, the pox-fouled wenches and young wives
that, gaily yielding to their ravishers, clip and clip again.



In the raw veiled spring morning faint odours float of morning
Paris: aniseed, damp sawdust, hot dough of bread: and as I
cross the Pont Saint Michel the steelblue waking waters chill
my heart. They creep and lap about the island whereon men
have lived since the stone age ..... Tawny gloom in the vast
gargoyled church. It is cold as on that morning: 'quia frigus
erat.' Upon the steps of the far high altar, naked as the body
of the Lord, the ministers lie prostrate in weak prayer. The
voice of an unseen reader rises, intoning the lesson from
Hosea. 'Haec dicit Dominus: in tribulatione sua mane consusgent
ad me. Venite et reuertamur ad Dominum' .... She
stands beside me, pale and chill, clothed with the shadows of
the sindark nave, her thin elbow at my arm. Her flesh recalls
the thrill of that raw mist-veiled morning, hurrying torches,
cruel eyes. Her soul is sorrowful, trembles and would weep.
Weep not for me, 0 daughter of Jerusalem.
I expound Shakespeare to docile Triester: Hamlet, quoth. I,
who is most courteous. to gentle, and simple is rude only to
Polonius. Perhaps, an embittered idealist,he can see in the
parents of his beloved only grotesque attempts on the part of
nature to produce her image........... Marked you
that?



She walks before me along the corridor and as she walks a dark
coil of her hair slowly uncoils and falls. Slowly uncoiling,
falling hair! She does not know and walks before me, simple
and proud. So did she walk by Dante in simple pride and so,
stainless of blood and violation, the daughter of Cenci,
Beatrice, to her death:


........ Tie
My, girdle for me and bind up this hair
In any simple knot.



The housemaid tells me that they had to take her away at once
to the hospital, 'poveretta', that she suffered so much, so much,
'poveretta', that it is very grave......I walk away from her
empty house. Heel that I am about to cry. Ah, no! It will not be
like that, in a moment, without a word, without a look. No,
no! Surely hell's luck will not fail me!






Operated. The surgeon's knife has probed in her entrails and
withdrawn, leaving the raw jagged gash of its passage on her
belly. I see her full dark suffering eyes, beautiful as the eyes of
an antelope. O cruel wound! Libidinous God!



Once more in her chair by the window, happy words on her
tongue, happy laughter. A bird twittering after storm, happy
that its little foolish life has fluttered out of reach of the
clutching fingers of an epileptic lord and giver of life, twittering
happily, twittering and chirping happily.



She says that, had 'The Portrait of the Artist' been frank only for
frankness' sake, she would have asked why I had given it to her
to read. O you would, would you? A lady of letters.



She stands black-robed at the telephone. Litele timid laughs,
little cries, timid runs of speech suddenly broken .... 'Parlero
colla mamma' .... Come! chook, chook! come! The black
pullet is frightened: little runs suddenly broken, little timid
cries: it is crying for its mamma, the portly hen.



Loggione. The sodden walls ooze a steamy damp. A
symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms:
sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, metting breast ointments,
mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous
garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax. The frank sweat
of-marriageable and married-womankind; the soapy stink of
men......All night I have watched her, all night I shall see
her: braided and pinnacled hair and olive oval face and calm
soft eyes. A· green fillet upon her hair and about her body a
green-broidered gown: the hue of the illusion of the vegetable
glass of nature and of lush grass, the hair of graves.



My words in her mind: cold polished stones sinking through a
quagmire.



Those quiet cold fingers have touched the pages, foul and fair,
on which my shame shall glow for ever. Quiet and cold and
pure fingers. Have they never erred?



Her body has no smell: an odourless flower.



On the stairs. A cold frail hand: shyness, silence: dark languor flooded eyes: weariness.



Whirling wreaths of grey vapour upon the heath. Her face,
how grey and grave! Dark matted hair. Her lips press softly,
her sighing breath comes through. Kissed.

My voice, dying in the echoes of its words, dies like the
wisdom-wearied voice of the Eternal calling on Abraham
through echoing hills. She leans back against the pillowed
wall:· odalisque-featured in the luxurious obscurity. Her eyes
have drunk my thoughts: and into the moist warm yielding
welcoming darkness of her womanhood my soul, itself dissolving,
has streamed and poured and flooded a liquid and
abundant seed...... Take her now who will! ....



As I come out of Ralli's house? I come upon her suddenly as
we both are giving alms to a blind beggar. She answers my
sudden greeting by turning and averting her black basilisk
eyes. 'E col suo vedere attosca l'uomo quando lo vede'. I
Thank you for the word, messer Brunetto.



They spread under my feet carpets for the son of man. They
await my passing. She stands in the yellow shadow of the
hall, a plaid cloak shielding from chills her sinking
shoulders: and as I halt in wonder and look about me she
greets me wintrily and passes up the staircase darting at me for
an instant out of her sluggish sidelong eyes a jet of liquorish
venom.



A soft crumpled peagreen cover drapes the lounge. A narrow
Parisian room. The hairdresser lay here but now. I kissed her
stocking and the hem of her rustblack dusty skirt. It is the
other. She. Gogarty came yesterday to be introduced. Ulysses
is the reason. Symbol of the intellectual conscience....Ireland then? And the husband? Pacing the corridor in list shoes or playing chess against himself. Why are we left here?
The hairdresser lay here but now, clutching my head between her knobby knees . . . . Intellectual symbol of my race.
Listen! The plunging gloom has fallen. Listen!
- I am not convinced that such activities of the mind or body
can be called unhealthy -
She speaks. A weak voice from beyond the cold stars.
Voice of wisdom. Say on! 0, say again, making me wise! This
voice I never heard.
She coils towards me along the crumpled lounge. I cannot
move or speak. Coiling approach of starborn flesh. Adultery
of wisdom. No. I will go. I will.
- Jim, Iove.-
Soft sucking lips kiss my left armpit: a coiling kiss on myriad
veins. I burn! I crumple like a burning leaf! From my right
armpit a fang of flame leaps out. A starry snake has kissed
me: a cold nightsnake. I am lost!
-Nora!-



Jan Pieters Sweelink. The quaint name of the old Dutch
musician makes all beauty seem quaint and far. I hear his
variations for the clavichord on an old air: 'Youth has an
end'. In the vague mist of old sounds a faint point of light
appears: the speech of the soul is about to be heard. Youth has
an end: the end is here. It will never be. You know that well.
What then? Write it, damn you, write it! What else are you
good for?

"Why?"
"Because otherwise I could uot see yoU.
Sliding - space - ages - foliage of stars - and waning heaven -
stillness - and stillness deeper - stillness of annihilation - and
her voice.



Non hunc sed Barabbam?



Unreadiness. A bare apartment. Torbid [?Torpid] daylight. A
long black piano: coffin of music. Poised on its edge a
woman's hat, red-flowered, and umbrella, furled. Her arms: .
a casque, gules, and blunt spear'" on a field, sable.



Envoy: Love me, love my umbrella.