(Apologies to “Pastorale” of Mr. Crane in the Dial.)

1

   I, who live

In the fourth dimension

On the third story

Of a not-unfashionable house

In a fashionable neighbourhood,

With pictures of Bill Sommer hung on the wall,

And an occasional one by myself—

That one, the woman’s uplifted face, for instance—

My best, I think,

A miraculous stroke,

Unthinkingly executed;

But Willy Lescaze liked it. . .

Lescaze . . . smearing the butter on one’s bread

With the supreme unction

Of a third-rate director

Of a fourth-rate playhouse,

Discoursing the pros and cons of art,

Somewhere in a bookshop in the Taylor Arcade,

Smiling to the ladies with bobbed hair

And occasionally to the gentlemen—

How I hate that type!

Hate it—hate it,

With the consistance of a hard substance,

Despising a piece of fluidity!

2

   Yes, I know

Most of the Spittle Review crowd,

But something,

Money, no doubt,

Drew me to Cleveland,

To the home of Crane’s Candies,

Mary Garden Chocolates,

And Laukhuff’s Bookshop.

Here it was,

That in the light of an interpreter,

Soon I met and succeeded

In surrounding myself

With a few of the Intelligentsia

That Cleveland affords,

Loveman, Sommer, Lescaze, Hatfield, Guenther. . . .

But Loveman

Left the fold early—pity, yes!

I might have made much of him,

In spite of his Hebraism,

Which (sibilantly whispered)

I did not recognize,

Even on my mother’s hearsay—

But there was much of the rebel,

Inborn and instinctive,

(As in all Jews)

In Loveman,

And so, after a perfectly wild argument

With him one lovely night, late July,

With the syringas in full blossom

On 115th Street,

We parted

To meet no more—at least as friends.

3

   And so,

Realizing, after all,

As I did, and so many before me,

Maxwell Bodenheim, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Anderson, Sherwood Anderson (No relations!), James Joyce, Ezra Pound,

And how many others,

Even less than myself,

That what it all amounts to,

In life, as in literature—

Is form.

Not emotion, not poetry, not beauty,

But the hard, visible outline.

Dave Gordon

(I can hardly control myself when I think of him!)

Asserted to Loveman,

Which in a fit of epilepsy, apoplexy or delirium,

Loveman seconded;

That my work—my own—my own,

Was a shade of T. S. Eliot’s, who was a shade

Of Jules Laforgue!

Ridiculous! Stupid! Ridiculous!

Men of genius

Are all derivative.

Shakspere, for instance,

Has even as much influenced

Internally as externally,

T. S. Eliot.

4

   The wind wails

Around the corner of Euclid and 115th St.,

The trees shiver

Like brass, or cymbals of some such metal,

It rains and then it ceases,

But I, seated on my Aztec carpets,

And playing Debussy

On the wheezy Victrola,

(What Rhythms! What Rhythms!)

Conjure for myself

An entire world,

Made of myself, by myself, for myself!

Knowing myself

To be myself.