53

ED CAMPBELL

Upon the flagstones, behind great pillars of stone
Of the courthouse portico, day by endless day,
And through long years, Ed Campbell, friendless grown,
Walked life away.

Old men in the village said that he was once
A mind of quickest memory, learning, skill
As a lawyer until he woke to find his sconce
Empty from being ill.

They said he had a fever from too much drink,
And when he got up from two months in bed
Found he could not remember, could not think,
His mind was dead.

And so he walked. And school boys becoming men
Watched him for years, just swinging to and fro
Upon those flagstones, again and yet again
Turning and passing slow.

About his frame was a thin and flapping coat,
Upon his white head a soft old crumpled hat,
His shoes had holes, around his shrunken throat
Was a stained cravat.

So back and forth with his thin hands clasped behind
His back, leaning and stooped, reflecting when he paused,
He walked those flagstones like a soul confined,
Mild eyed and gentle voiced.

He always said good morning, made some remark
About the weather, as he kept his pace.
We longed to hear him quote verse, strike a spark
Out of his fiery days,

When he knew Shakespeare by the page, and stood
In Sandy Hughes's bar, and spoke Macbeth,
Or Richard II, or Prospero's mood,
Or Falstaff's death.

All was forgotten. And we lacked similes ,
And prototypes for him, so lank and worn,
We did not know about Carneades,
Nietzsche and Hawthorne,

Who walked because the walking age must come,
Who made a pth, such as Ed Campbell made
In limestone, and as Hawthorne said would sum
Spirits by life betrayed.

Edwin, to be a peripatetic prisoner,
But be no Aristotle, and round and round
To walk, yet be no great philosopher
Comes from a wordless wound.

FELLATIO

Naked and with a turban around her head,
Scented with orient essence on loins and breast,
Shameless as nature, Anita, with no request
Kneels by my waiting body on the bed.

It is her own desire to make complete
The ritual of love, to realize
Imagination's longings. With closed eyes
Softly she stirs the chrim to her so sweet.

But not with lips upon my body first,
Nor tongue tip-racing the antheridium
Does she begin. She wakes delirium
At once with mouth enclosing all for thirst.

Her soul is rapt now as her rhythmic neck
Bends up and down: for Mutumus now commands
Her silent praise, and with adoring hands
Under my hips she drains me to the quick.

Yet with no formal worship does she stop,
But like a player on the clarinet,
Plaving a coda, as an amoret
She hold until her throat takes every drop.

Nor does she seek ablutions incontinence
From lips to wash. Her lovely smile conceals
What she has done. A little while she kneels
Then sits back allowing, sweet with innocence.

Arthur Davison Ficke, Esq.

Hillsdale,

New York.

HERMAPHRODITUS

Surrender the hope, Anita, that you will wed;
Nothing will be but years of vain desire,
As with decreasing fire
You take one after one a man to bed.

At thirty-six your breasts are shriveling,
The hair is sprouting on your lower cheeks,
The recurring pimple speaks,
Despite all power, your lessened coloring.

A lengthened menopause has been your lot
These fifteen years gone by, as your delight
As an hermaphrodite
Has grown upon you, dubious cocotte.

For rural beauty, vanity, an itch
That made you scratch with madness at fourteen years
Long loneliness and tears
Suffice, without the surgeon's knife and stitch;

Suffice without the loss of ovaries,
And the excision of your infected womb:
For all this was your doom
As penalty of overlooked disease.

So came it that the entrance at your hips
Was scooped, which left a wide and hollow bowl,
And the channel a flattened scroll,
And not a slender vase which guides and grips.

Though not unsexed your tenderness suffered drouth,
And all maternal passion in you died.
How shall you be a bride
With little but your long perverted mouth,

And even that with a decreasing taste
For the hot stream of human caviare,
With arms grown angular,
With heavy hips below a boyish waist?

How shall you be a wife with such a tângue
Each day more shrewish to accuse, complain,
With your parental strain
Emerging to speak how vulgar you are sprung?

For soon not silks, not perfumes, not lip-sticks,
Not manners which ape the city parvenu,
The insolence of conceit, the Jew,
Will save you grown already thirty-six.

That you were caught by Fate in ignorant youth,
That you have tried to overcome your faults
In no wise stays or halts
The consequences of inevitable truth.

2

While Hesperides who guards
The heart of man, the hearth,
Warns travelers and bards
Of peril in the earth,

Of hunger, conquerors,
Gold-madness, tyrannies,
Hate and imperials were
That wreck Hesperides,

That breed the moth, bring rust
That into metal eats,
While apples turn to dust,
And dragons bring defeats.

Where is Virginia now
With plenty, peace and love?
No heart can now avow
This realm the place thereof.

Now under fairest flowers
The dragon lurks and glowers;
Now over Santa Cruz
Sails high the beachy fuse.

The only Hesperides
Is in the human heart,
Whose hopes and dreams impart
A beauty that saves and frees:

That human heart remains,
All else is lost and gone,
Until another dawn
With light the heaven stains.

April 27 1943.