The Project Gutenberg EBook of Minna and Myself, by Maxwell Bodenheim This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: Minna and Myself Author: Maxwell Bodenheim Contributor: Ben Hecht Release Date: April 4, 2019 [EBook #59203] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MINNA AND MYSELF *** Produced by Tim Lindell, Chuck Greif and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries) {1} ACKNOWLEDGMENT Our thanks to the following publications, for their kindness in permitting us to reprint, in this volume, poems that have appeared in their pages: The Little Review; Poetry; the New Republic; the Century; the New York Tribune; the Touchstone; the Seven Arts; the Pagan; the Egoist. Copyright, 1918. Pagan Publishing Co. New York DEDICATED BY BOTH OF US TO Fedya Ramsay CONTENTS MINNA Poems MYSELF Poems THE MASTER POISONER A One-Act Poetic Play by Maxwell Bodenheim and Ben Hecht POET’S HEART A Poetic Play in One Act A FOREWORD It is hard for me to realize that this is a first volume of verse. Most of the initial ventures that have passed under my jaundiced eye have been precisely what such early collections are expected to be. They were, as Wilde expressed it somewhere, “promissory notes {2} {3} {4} {5} {7} {6} —that are never met.”... But though it is hard for me to believe that this is a first book, it is still harder for me to believe that this is Maxwell Bodenheim’s first book. In these days of the much advertised “poetic renaissance,” when the Dial out-radicals the Little Review, and even the New York Tribune prints vers-libre on its editorial page, I expected to see nothing less than Bodenheim’s Collected works.... This pleasure will evidently have to be deferred.... Meanwhile, here is an indication, and no slight one, of how distinguished and decorative that collection will be. Without Kreymborg’s caustic and acerb irony, or Johns’ fluent lyricism, Bodenheim has something that neither they nor, for that matter, any of his colleagues in “Others” possess. I refer to his extreme sensitivity to words. Words, under his hands, have unexpected growths; placid nouns and sober adjectives bear fantastic fruit. It is a strange and often magic potion he brews from them; dark and fiery liquids that he pours into curiously designed cups. Sometimes he gets drunk with his own distillation, and reels between preciosity and incoherence. Sometimes the mixture is so strong that even his metaphors, crowding about each other, become inextricably mixed. But as a rule, Bodenheim is as clear-headed as he is colorful. Among the younger men he has no superior in his use of the verbal nuance. But it is not merely as word-juggler that Bodenheim shines. He has an imagination that he uses both as a tool and as a toy. Personally, I care more for Bodenheim when he plays with his images (as in “Poet to His Love,” “Hill Side Tree” and certain of the poems to “Minna”), than when his figures attempt to build or destroy something (as in “To An Enemy,” “The Interne,” “Soldiers”). It is as a decorator that his gifts serve him best. Even such an intimate picture as “Factory Girl” is saved from mawkishness by his delicate sense of design. The composition in which Death is seen as “...a black slave with little silver birds Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head” has a quality that suggests the Beardsley of “Under the Hill.” In the realm of the whimsical-grotesque, Bodenheim walks with a light but sure footstep. There are doubtless other things—sharper and more important—in the following poems that will attract many. But the ones that I have found seem to have a quiet, unofficial, dignity of their own. Others may ask for more. For me, they are sufficient. LOUIS UNTERMEYER. MINNA I Twilight pushes down your eyes With shimmering, pregnant fingers That leave you covered with still-born touch. With little whips of dead words Silence cuts your lips to a keener red. Your heart strikes its bed of dark mirth, in death, And your hands lie over it, guarding the corpse. Night will soon whisk away this room But you are already invisible. II Your cheeks are spent diminuendos Sheering into the rose-veiled silence of your lips. Your eyes are gossamer coquettes Ringed with the sparkling breath of dead loves. Your body strays into lanterns of form Strewing the night within this room.... The light dies; you are still And spill the frolicing night of your heart Over the darkness about you, making it pale. III {8} {9} {10} {11} {12} {13} Your criss-crossed ringlets of hair Are tipped with faltering opalescence. At dawn a lost smile ever returns And hides in your hair because he fears The solemn marble profile of your face. His presence caresses your lips to wings of color That beat against each other and release Dulcet, feathery tinges of love descending to your heart. And thus, each morning, your rising heart Wears a new bridal robe. IV Moonlight bends over black silence, Making it bloom to wild-flowers of sound That only green things can hear. A wind sprawls over an orchard, Frightening its silent litany to sound. A thread of star-light has fallen to this tree And curls among its leaves, tangling them to silence.... Standing amidst these things, Beloved, We feel the words our hearts cannot form. V Pain is a country cousin of yours. He flings buds of awakening desires Upon the stately weddings in your heart, And laughs. You must teach him better manners; Bind his mouth with pale sleep; Caress him with trailing hands That loosen the buds he has stolen, into flowers. VI We met upon nearby hill-tops of our lives And shook the dust from us, revealing flame-laced clothes And eyeing each other in the same moment. You curved a longing to the wave of your arm: A longing for dark rest crossed by unbidden gifts. And my eyes deepened in answer.... Then we floated down to the valley between us: The valley ringed with smooth honey-combs of sleep. VII You have a morning-glory face Whose edges are sensitive to light And curl in beneath the burden of a smile. Remembered silence returns to the morning-glory And lattices its curves With shades of golden reverberations. Then the morning-glory’s heart careens to loves Whose scent beats on the sky-walls of your soul. {14} {15} {16} {17} {18} VIII You draw my heart about you, as a cloak, And your words steal over it like a reluctant color: A color of pain that fears to die. My heart ripples with your slight turning But sometimes moves when you are still, Beckoning to longings that have not reached your mouth. IX Sedate and archaic, a twilight-frilled haze Walks over the meadows like rolled-out centuries Quivering in sprightly welcome. Trees pushed down by silence; Trees lolling in comely abandon; Trees pungently flamboyant, Their leaves spinning in the wind’s golden elusiveness. Trees probing the shrilly sensitive sunset Like little, laced nightmares leaning Upon a scarlet breast; Trees sprinkling their stifled mockery Upon the blue tomb of the air; Trees, are you silenced beings Whitening into the winding paradise Of old loves seeking a second death? And has this archaic, twilight-frilled haze Moulded me to your semblance? X The wrinkled grimaces of eastern skies Are caught on the Chinese mirrors of your eyes And lie, pallid and benign. Your mouth is a senile dragon Spitting fire-fly words from its vermillion shroud. Your cheeks are shrunken silences of Gods Paling out upon ivoried Nirvanas of silk. Your face holds fugitive bits of your heart That wandered away and returned to rest. XI Your body was puzzling, like a half-made figure Till the final shaping of your voice came And riotous secrets of lines curved out And trembled upon your limbs. Then silence touched your body to motion: Your limbs released fleeing andantes of pain And your heart flung little crescents of budding caresses Into the waiting hunger of your eyes. XII {19} {20} {21} {22} You are a well sprayed with cool rubies of sound In which I bathe and rise with another skin Like moon-stone passion slyly courting The light breath of a tired dream. I drop my heart into the depths Of your disheveled serenity, And stroll off empty. When my heart has merged to your shades of pearl quietness I return and once more drop within you. XIII The mellow anger of his hair Disputes his sleepy girl’s face. His robe glows like a painted wound Upon the bent meditation of his body. His hands are so thin that silence bruises them: Thin from the pressure brought by endless prayers... When you were with me I did not know That your voice was pouring him out in molten colors To be shaped by the fingers of my memory— This prince-made-of-many-deal-loves. XIV Sometimes jaded, sometimes tranquil, Your eyes invade the tumult of your face. Your lips are the remnants of a love That made a sunset-cup of your face. The movements of your body Caress the couch you sit on into sound That seems to answer your words. You are restless because upon this couch The cold touch of your lover lies And seeps into you, reaching your heart. XV Your arms, in faltering crescendos, Wander through the room Tinted with expectation of night. The room seems a tottering tomb Through which you roam with hands Striving to press each form into the shape Of someone buried beneath you.... Only when night sprays the room with his breath Do you change to that which you seek. XVI {23} {24} {25} {26} Two walls, dizzy with rain-touch And suffused with gauzily amorous sunlight, Creep over a hill and meet. And so our foreheads touch. Silence between our hands grows into clasped music Sprinkling our finger-tips with attenuated chords of touch. Our hearts weave low songs to this accompaniment: So low that even silence cannot hear. XVII Afternoon sunlight limps tenuously away, Leaving a snarled retrospect of golden foot-marks. The sea is pregnant with gracious discords That falteringly shroud the sleep-rhythmed breasts of winds. The sky is a genially vacant stare. Remaining touches of starlight Tremble the leaves when air is still.... And so my love for you strolls through this day, Picking up forgotten hints of its heart. XVIII Maiden My heart is a slovenly russet peasant-girl Flirting with staidly immaculate swains. Youth And mine is summer-rain Strewing itself in mirthful swirls Over the odorous pain of flowers That long to dance. Maiden My heart will walk through yours, Holding its crushed robe in both hands And quieting, with gentle nakedness, The mirthful rain and odorous pain in your heart. Youth When your heart leaves mine it will be an old woman With two of my shrunken flowers for her breasts. XIX Your breast is the bridal-couch of our stillness. The restless beggar of our breath Leaves the folding of stillness, reeling with gifts, With dreams in which we glimpse our own scars. We give these reflections of scars to stillness And she turns them into bitter hummingbirds Offering us the colored death of song Held out in her enticing hands. {27} {28} {29} {30} XX Like prayers born dead, long shadows Strew the floor and clutch at your feet, But buoyant with paint you walk to and fro. The room is garlanded with unseen eyes That you must evade lest they touch you into sight And send you, naked, into the moonlight. XXI Your body is a closed fan Holding long brush-strokes of glowing repose. Your words clumsily unloosen the fan And it dips to the rustling birth of forgotten doubts. Your soul bears the fan lightly in his hand And waves to the mirror his blind eyes cannot touch. XXII The gown you wear is curiously like sound— Tangles of dahlia-murmurs taking shape In shrinking, mellow sprays. The everlasting journey of your heart Gliding over a sleepy litany That winds through scattered star-flowers of regrets: The everlasting journey of your heart Is like a fragile traveler of sound— A murmur seeking the love that gave it birth. XXIII Whenever a love dies within you, Griefs, phosphorescent with unborn tears, Cut the glowing hush of a meadow within you: Griefs striking their pearl-voiced cymbals And shaping the silences once held by your love. Your new love blows a trumpet of sunlight Into the meadow, and your griefs Leap into the echo and return to you. XXIV We blew a luminous confusion of thoughts Upon the silence of our souls, Staining it to little, weeping tints. Our hands pressed serpentine pain into each other And stroked it away to twilights of relief. Our lips shook before the tread of coming words, But closed again, finding no need for them. XXV {31} {32} {33} {34} {35} Upon an arched sarcophagus of pain Are figures painted in arrested embraces With outlines so light that we must bend close to see: Old loves almost merging to one tone Of pale regret that holds An inner glow of dead weeping. Our lips cling and our breath winds to a hand With touch like summer rain Blending the arrested figures upon the arched sarcophagus of pain. XXVI Make of your voice, a dawn Dropping little gestures upon my forehead, While slumber-edged thoughts rise in my head And wave back greetings droll and confused. Pain has jested with the whirling night And both vanish like an untold prayer, So, make of your voice, a dawn Dropping little gestures upon my forehead. XXVII Your mind is a little, clandestine pastel Shaped into a posture of rigid grief. Its colors huddle together And make a stunted, aching lyric.... Ah frail-flowered moment preceding reality— Your eyelids open; the little pastel dies. MYSELF POET TO HIS LOVE An old silver church in a forest Is my love for you. The trees around it Are words that I have stolen from your heart. An old silver bell, the last smile you gave, Hangs at the top of my church. It rings only when you come through the forest And stand beside it. And then, it has no need for ringing, For your voice takes its place. DEATH {36} {37} {39} {38} {40} {41} {42} I shall walk down the road. I shall turn and feel upon my feet The kisses of Death, like scented rain. For Death is a black slave with little silver birds Perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head. He will tell me, his voice like jewels Dropped into a satin bag, How he has tip-toed after me down the road, His heart made a dark whirlpool with longing for me. Then he will graze me with his hands And I shall be one of the sleeping, silver birds Between the cold waves of his hair, as he tip-toes on. TO GEORGIE MAY The ruins of your face were twined with youth. Vines of starlight questioned your face when you smiled. Your eyes dissolved over distances And steeped the graves of many loves. Night was kind to your body: The careless vehemence of curves Softened beneath your darkly-loosened dress. And your heart toyed with an emotion That left you vague hunger poised over death. POET-VAGABOND GROWN OLD The dust of many roads has been my grey wine. Surprised beech-trees have bowed With me, to the plodding morning Humming tunes frail as webs of dead perfume, To his love in golden silks, the departed moon. Maidens like rose-flooded statues Have bathed me in the wine of their silence. But now I walk on, alone. And only after watching many evenings, Do I dance a bit with dying wisps of moon-light, To persuade myself that I am young. BLIND Blinder than oak-trees in the wind Endlessly weaving sighs into a poem To sight, He sits, the light of one pale purple lantern Seeping into his dream-hollowed face, Like floating, transparent words Pale with unuttered meanings. He mends a flute and sighs as though Its shadow leaned heavily upon his heart And told him things his dead eyes could not grasp. LOVE {43} {44} {45} {46} You seemed a caryatid melting Into the wind-blown, dark blue temple of the sky. But you bent down as I came closer, breaking the image. When I passed, you raised your head And blew the little feather of a smile upon me. I caught it on open lips and blew it back. And in that moment we loved, Although you stood still waiting for your lover, And I walked on to my love. HILL-SIDE TREE Like a drowsy, rain-browned saint, You squat, and sometimes your voice In which the wind takes no part, Is like mists of music wedding each other. A drunken, odor-laced peddler is the morning wind. He brings you golden-scarfed cities Whose voices are swirls of bells burdened with summer; And maidens whose hearts are galloping princes. And you raise your branches to the sky, With a whisper that holds the smile you cannot shape. INTRUSION The lilies sag with rain-drops: Their petals hold fire that does not break out. (As though it slept between vapor-silk It could not burn). And a young breeze stumbles upon the lilies And strokes them with his spinning hands.... The lilies and the young breeze are not unlike Your silence and the rush of soft words breaking it. CHANGE I came upon a maiden Blowing rose petals in the air And catching them, as they fell, Upon quick fingertips Her laugh fell lighter than the petals And dropped little gestures upon my forehead. I gave her sadness and she blew it up As she had blown the rose petals: And it almost seemed joy as her fingers caught it. But I was only a wanderer plaited with dust, Who gave her new petals to play with. PORTRAITS I {47} {48} {49} {50} You were in the room, yet your body Was stone cut in drooping lines And hued with decorous puzzling pinks and browns. Even your hair seemed an elfin wig Carelessly thrown upon your stone head. And your eyes were hollows cradling broken shadows. When you spoke your body did not change: It was as though a flock of sleepy birds Had issued from your stone mouth. II Vague words tapered off to pale weariness, And sunlight was night smiling in his sleep. Your hands moved as though they sought a dying emotion: Your lips, drawn back, seemed evading sound. When twilight fell upon us, Like night striving to forget his dream, We had long since passed out of the room. MEETING A mood whose heart was a flagon of ashes, Met another mood whose lips were stained With the odors of sleeping wine-songs. The second mood kissed the breast of the first And filled the ashen flagon with his pale purple breath. Then the two moods died, and he who bore them, Being an old man, sat down to make others. COTTON-PICKER Like the arms of a child lifting shining white lilies from a little brown pond, Sunlight drew songs from this lithe, grimacing negress Whose skin was smoother than the cloudless sky above her. The flecks of cotton they picked brought a changing white stupor To the negroes about her, but she swung down her row, With broad smiles cutting her pent-up satin face. And though the afternoon slowly pressed down her back, She never ceased humming to her joyous Christ. FRIENDSHIP Grey, drooping-shouldered bushes scrape the edges Of bending swirls of yellow-white flowers. So do my thoughts meet the wind-scattered color of you. A green-shadowed trance of water Is splintered to little, white tasseled awakenings By the beat of long, black oars. So do my thoughts enter yours. Split, brown-blue clouds press into each other Over hills dressed in mute, clinging haze. So do my thoughts slowly form Over the draped mystery of you. {51} {52} {53} {54} FACTORY GIRL Why are your eyes like dry brown flower-pods, Still, gripped by the memory of lost petals? I feel that if I touched them They would crumble to falling brown dust And you would stand with blindness revealed. Yet, you would not shrink, for your life Has been long since memorized, And eyes would only melt out against its high walls. Besides, in the making of boxes Sprinkled with crude forget-me-nots, One is curiously blessed if ones eyes are dead. DEATH I A fan of smoke in the long, green-white revery of the sky, Slowly curls apart. So shall we rise and widen out in the silence of air. II An old man runs down a little yellow road To an out-flung, white thicket uncovered by morning. So shall I swing to the white sharpness of death. INTERLUDE Sun-light recedes on the mountains, in long gold shafts, Like the falling pillars of a temple. Then singing silence almost too nimble for ears: The mountain-tenors fling their broad voices Into the blue hall of the sky, And through a rigid column of these voices Night dumbly walks. Night, crushing sound between his fingers Until it forms a lightly frozen couch On which he dreams. CHORUS GIRL Her voice was like rose-fragrance waltzing in the wind. She seemed a shadow stained with shadow colors Swinging through waves of sunlight. Perhaps her heart was an old minstrel Sleepily pawing at his little mandolin. OLD AGE {55} {56} {57} {58} In me is a little painted square Bordered by old shops, with gaudy awnings. And before the shops sit smoking, open-bloused old men, Drinking sunlight. The old men are my thoughts: And I come to them each evening, in a creaking cart, And quietly unload supplies. We fill slim pipes and chat, And inhale scents from pale flowers in the center of the square.... Strong men, tinkling women, and dripping, squealing children Stroll past us, or into the shops. They greet the shopkeepers, and touch their hats or foreheads to me.... Some evening I shall not return to my people. TO ONE DEAD I walked upon a hill And the wind, made solemnly drunk with your presence, Reeled against me. I stooped to question a flower, And you floated between my fingers and the petals, Tying them together. I severed a leaf from its tree And a water-drop in the green flagon Cupped a hunted bit of your smile. All things about me were steeped in your remembrance And shivering as they tried to tell me of it. TO A DISCARDED STEEL RAIL Straight strength pitched into the surliness of the ditch: A soul you have—strength has always delicate, secret reasons. Your soul is a dull question. I do not care for your strength, but your stiff smile at Time: A smile which men call rust. TO AN ENEMY I despise my friends more than you. I would have known myself but they stood before the mirrors And painted on them images of the virtues I craved. You came with sharpest chisel, scraping away the false paint. Then I knew and detested myself, but not you, For glimpses of you in the glasses you uncovered Showed me the virtues whose images you destroyed. SOLDIERS {59} {60} {61} {62} The smile of one face is like a fierce mermaid Floating dead in a little pale-brown pond. The lips of one are twisted To a hieroglyphic of silence. The face of another is like a shining frog. Another face is met by a question That digs into it like sudden claws. Beside it is a face like a mirror In which a stiffened child dangles.... Dead soldiers, in a sprawling crescent, Whose faces form a gravely mocking sentence. FORGETFULNESS Happier than green-kirtled apple-trees Waving their soft-rimmed fans of light And taking the morning mist, in quick breaths, You sit in the woven meditation and surprise Of a morning uncovering its wind-wreathed head. And yet within the light stillness of your soul Dream-heavy guards sleep uneasily Over the body of your last slain sorrow. THE INTERNE O the agony of having too much power! In my passive palm are hundreds of lives. Strange alchemy, they drain my blood. My heart becomes iron; my brain copper; my eyes silver; my lips brass. Merely by twitching a supple finger, I twirl lives from me, Strong-winged or fluttering and broken. They are my children: I am their mother and father. I watch them live and die. REAR PORCHES OF AN APARTMENT BUILDING A sky that has never known sun, moon, or stars, A sky that is like a dead, kind face Would have the color of your eyes, O servant-girl singing of pear-trees in the sun And scraping the yellow fruit you once picked When your lavender-white eyes were alive. On the porch above you sit two women With faces the color of dry brown earth; They knit grey rosettes and nibble cakes. And on the porch above them are three children Gravely kissing each other’s foreheads, And an ample nurse with a huge red fan.... The death of the afternoon to them Is but the lengthening of blue-black shadows on brick walls. TO ONE DEAD {63} {64} {65} {66}