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Demain le noir matin, Je fermerai la porte Au nez des années mortes; J’irai par les chemins. Je mendierai ma vie Sur la terre et sur l’onde, Du vieux au nouveau monde
“hat fingan kahwa bisukkar, ya weled.”
Pazzo son! Guardate, come io piango ed imploro . .
Come io chiedo pietà!
rue de Ras-et-Tin
“Mi corazón, es tan solo, mi corazón .
Non dimenticar, che t’i’ho voluto tanto bene, Ho saputo amar; non dimenticar
tell tall stories to girls I want to screw, Profane thought. He scratched his armpit. “Kill alligators,” he said. “Wha.” He told her about the alligators; Angel, who had a fertile imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the stoop they hammered together a myth. Because it wasn’t born from fear of thunder, dreams, astonishment at how the crops kept dying after harvest and coming up again every spring, or anything else very permanent, only a temporary interest, a spur-of-the-moment tumescence, it was a myth rickety and transient as the bandstands and the sausage-pepper booths of
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je ne sais quoi de sinistre
he couldn’t yet become serious over politics. But he had a mighty impatience with the older generation, which is almost as good as open rebellion. He became more bored with talk of Empire the further he lumbered upward out of the slough of adolescence; shunned every hint of glory like the sound of a leper’s rattle.
Sunlight, bouncing off the Arno, off the fronts of shops, fractured into spectra by the falling rain, seemed to tangle or lodge in his blond hair, eyebrows, mustache, turning that face to a mask of inaccessible ecstasy; contradicting the sorrowing and weary eyeholes. You would be drawn inevitably again to these eyes, linger as you might have on the rest of the face: any Visitors’ Guide to Signor Mantissa must accord them an asterisk denoting special interest.
Il piove, dolor mia Ed anch’io piango
Vedi, donna vezzosa, questo poveretto, Sempre cantante d’amore come—
un gabinetto è un gabinetto.”
“You know how a boy is. There comes a time for departure, a point where he sees confirmed the suspicion he’d had for some time that his father is not a god, not even an oracle. He sees that he no longer has any right to any such faith.
He will take your gift and use it for himself, for his own life. I do not malign him. It is the way a younger generation acts: that, simply. You, as a boy, probably bore away some such gift from your own father, not realizing that it was still as valuable to him as it would be to you. But when the English speak of ‘passing down’ something from one generation to another, it is only that. A son passes nothing back up. Perhaps this is a sad thing, and not Christian, but it has been that way since time out of mind, and will never change.
“Avanti, i miei fratelli,”
“Figli di Machiavelli, avanti alla donna Libertà!”
mail
male ?
thyme
theme
3 September 1939:
England and France declare war on Germany after its invasion of Poland.
marid b’mohhu.
mentally ill (Maltese)
Free verse: why not? There was simply not the time to cast it into rhyme or metre, to take care with assonance and ambiguity. Poetry had to be as hasty and rough as eating, sleep or sex. Jury-rigged and not as graceful as it might have been. But it did the job; put the truth on record.
Poetry is not communication with angels or with the “subconscious.” It is communication with the guts, genitals and five portals of sense. Nothing more.
He did nothing so complex as drift away from God or reject his Church. Losing faith is a complicated business and takes time. There are no epiphanies, no “moments of truth.” It takes much thought and concentration in the later phases, which themselves come about through an accumulation of small accidents: examples of general injustice, misfortune falling upon the godly, prayers of one’s own unanswered.
He jittered the receiver, dialed information. “Where can I get three hundred bills,” he said. “No, the banks are closed. . . . I am against usury.” He quoted to the phone operator from Ezra Pound’s Cantos.
putains
whores
jittenngs
jitterings
januning
jamming
1324.”
1903
Sant’ Ugo di Tagliapiombo di Sammut,
