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Delmore Schwartz - ProthalamionDelmore Schwartz - Prothalamion
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"little soul, little flirting,          little perverse one            where are you off to now?        little wan one, firm one          little exposed one…            and never make fun of me again." Now I must betray myself. The feast of bondage and unity is near, And none engaged in that great piety When each bows to the other, kneels, and takes Hand in hand, glance and glance, care and care, None may wear masks or enigmatic clothes, For weakness blinds the wounded face enough. In sense, see my shocking nakedness. I gave a girl an apple when five years old, Saying, Will you be sorry when I am gone? Ravenous for such courtesies, my name Is fed like a raving fire, insatiate still. But do not be afraid. For I forget myself. I do indeed Before each genuine beauty, and I will Forget myself before your unknown heart. I will forget the speech my mother made In a restaurant, trapping my father there At dinner with his whore. Her spoken rage Struck down the child of seven years With shame for all three, with pity for The helpless harried waiter, with anger for The diners gazing, avid, and contempt And great disgust for every human being. I will remember this. My mother`s rhetoric Has charmed my various tongue, but now I know Love`s metric seeks a rhyme more pure and sure. For thus it is that I betray myself, Passing the terror of childhood at second hand Through nervous, learned fingertips. At thirteen when a little girl died, I walked for three weeks neither alive nor dead, And could not understand and still cannot The adult blind to the nearness of the dead, Or carefully ignorant of their own death. —This sense could shadow all the time`s curving fruits, But we will taste of them the whole night long, Forgetting no twelfth night, no fete of June, But in the daylight knowing our nothingness. Let Freud and Marx be wedding guests indeed! Let them mark out masks that face us there, For of all anguish, weakness, loss and failure, No form is cruel as self-deception, none Shows day-by-day a bad dream long lived And unbroken like the lies We tell each other because we are rich or poor. Though from the general guilt not free We can keep honor by being poor. The waste, the evil, the abomination Is interrupted. the perfect stars persist Small in the guilty night,        and Mozart shows The irreducible incorruptible good Risen past birth and death, though he is dead. Hope, like a face reflected on the windowpane, Remote and dim, fosters a myth or dream, And in that dream, I speak, I summon all Who are our friends somehow and thus I say: "Bid the jewellers come with monocles, Exclaiming, Pure! Intrinsic! Final! Summon the children eating ice cream To speak the chill thrill of immediacy. Call for the acrobats who tumble The ecstasy of the somersault. Bid the self-sufficient stars be piercing In the sublime and inexhaustible blue. "Bring a mathematician, there is much to count, The unending continuum of my attention: Infinity will hurry his multiplied voice! Bring the poised impeccable diver, Summon the skater, precise in figure, He knows the peril of circumstance, The risk of movement and the hard ground. Summon the florist! And the tobacconist! All who have known a plant-like beauty: Summon the charming bird for ignorant song. "You, Athena, with your tired beauty, Will you give me away? For you must come In a bathing suit with that white owl Whom, as I walk, I will hold in my hand. You too, Crusoe, to utter the emotion Of finding Friday, no longer alone; You too, Chaplin, muse of the curbstone, Mummer of hope, you understand!" But this is fantastic and pitiful, And no one comes, none will, we are alone, And what is possible is my own voice, Speaking its wish, despite its lasting fear; Speaking of its hope, its promise and its fear, The voice drunk with itself and rapt in fear, Exaggeration, braggadocio, Rhetoric and hope, and always fear: "For fifty-six or for a thousand years, I will live with you and be your friend, And what your body and what your spirit bears I will like my own body cure and tend. But you are heavy and my body`s weight Is great and heavy: when I carry you I lift upon my back time like a fate Near as my heart, dark when I marry you. "The voice`s promise is easy, and hope Is drunk, and wanton, and unwilled; In time`s quicksilver, where our desires grope, The dream is warped or monstrously fulfilled, In this sense, listen, listen, and draw near: Love is inexhaustible and full of fear." This life is endless and my eyes are tired, So that, again and again, I touch a chair, Or go to the window, press my face Against it, hoping with substantial touch, Colorful sight, or turning things to gain once more The look of actuality, the certainty Of those who run down stairs and drive a car. Then let us be each other`s truth, let us Affirm the other`s self, and be The other`s audience, the other`s state, Each to the other his sonorous fame. Now you will be afraid, when, waking up, Before familiar morning, by my mute side Wan and abandoned then, when, waking up, You see the lion or lamb upon my face Or see the daemon breathing heavily His sense of ignorance, his wish to die, For I am nothing because my circus self Divides its love a million times. I am the octopus in love with God, For thus is my desire inconclusible, Until my mind, deranged in swimming tubes, Issues its own darkness, clutching seas —-O God of my perfect ignorance, Bring the New Year to my only sister soon, Take from me strength and power to bless her head, Give her the magnitude of secular trust, Until she turns to me in her troubled sleep, Seeing me in my wish, free from self-wrongs.
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