Sex is but a dream to Seventy-and-over, But a joy proposed un-til we start to shave: Mouth-delight depends on Virtue in the cook, but This She guarantees from Cradle unto grave.
Lifted off the potty, Infants from their mothers Hear their first impartial Words of worldly praise: Hence, to start the morning With a satisfactory Dump is a good omen All our adult days.
Revelation came to Luther in a privy
(Crosswords have been solved there):
Rodin was no fool
When he cast his Thinker,
Cogitating deeply,
Crouched in the position
Of a man at stool.
All the Arts derive from This ur-act of making, Private to the artist: Makers' lives are spent Striving in their chosen Medium to produce a De-narcissus-ized en- -during excrement.
Freud did not invent the Constipated miser: Banks have letter boxes Built in their far;ade, Marked For Night Deposits, Stocks are firm or liquid, Currencies of nations Either soft or hard.
Global Mother, keep our Bowels of compassion Open through our lifetime, Purge our minds as welclass="underline" Grant us a kind ending, Not a second childhood, Petulant, weak-sphinctered, In a cheap hotel.
Keep us in our station: When we get pound-noteish, When we seem about to Take up Higher Thought, Send us some deflating Image like the pained ex-
-pression on a Major Prophet taken short.
(Orthodoxy ought to Bless our modern plumbing:
Swift and St. Augustine Lived in centuries When a stench of sewage Ever in the nostrils Made a strong debating Point for Manichees.)
Mind and Body run on Different timetables: Not until our morning Visit here can we Leave the dead concerns of Yesterday behind us, Face with all our courage What is now to be.
July 1964
VII Encomium Balnei
(FOR NEIL LITTLE) it is odd that the English
a rather dirty people should have invented the slogan Cleanliness is next to Godliness
meaning by that a gentleman smells faintly of tar persuaded themselves that constant cold hydropathy
would make the sons of gentlemen pure in heart
(not that papa or his chilblained offspring can hope to be gentry)
still John Bull's
hip-bath it was
that made one carnal pleasure lawful for the first time since we quarreled
over Faith and Works
(Shakespeare probably stank
Le Grand
Monarque certainly did)
thanks to him
shrines where a subarctic fire-cult could meet and marry
a river-cult from torrid Greece rose again
resweetened the hirsute West
a Roman though
bath addict
amphitheater fan would be puzzled
seeing the caracallan acreage compressed into such a few square feet mistake them for hideouts
warrens of some outlawed sect who mortify their flesh with strange implements
he is not that wrong
if the tepidarium's barrel vaulting has migrated to churches and railroad stations
if we no longer
go there to wrestle or gossip or make love
(you cannot purchase a conjugal tub) St. Anthony and his wild brethren (for them ablutions were tabu
a habit of that doomed behavioral sink this world)
have been
just as he thought
at work
we are no more chaste
obedient
nor
if we can possibly help it 264
poor than he was but
enthusiasts who were have taught us (besides showing lovers of nature how to carry binoculars instead of a gun)
the unclassical wonder of being all by oneself
though our dwellings may still have a master who owns the front-door key
a bathroom
has only an inside lock
belongs today to whoever
is taking a bath
among us to withdraw from the tribe at will
be neither Parent
Spouse nor Guest
is a sacrosanct
political right
where else shall the Average Ego find its peace
not in sleep surely the several worlds we invent are quite as pugnacious
as the one into which we are born and even more public
on Oxford Street or Broadway I may escape notice
but never
on roads I dream of
what Eden is there for the lapsed
but hot water
snug in its caul
widows
orphans
exiles may feel as self-important as an only child
and a sage be silly without shame
present a Lieder Abend 265
f'vT'
f.: f
to a captive audience of his toes retreat from rhyme and reason into some mallarmesque syllabic fog
for half an hour it is wise to forget the time
our daily peril
and each other
good for the soul once in the twenty-four hour cycle of her body
whether according to our schedule as we sit down to breakfast
or stand up to welcome
folk for dinner
to feel as if
the Pilgrim's Way
or as some choose to call it
the War Path
were now a square in the Holy City that what was wrong has been put right
as if Von Hugel's
hoggers and lumpers were extinct thinking the same as thanking
all military hardware already slighted and submerged
April 1962
VIII Grub First, Then Ethics
-Brecht
(FOR MARGARET GARDINER)
Should the shade of Plato visit us, anxious to know how anthropos is, we could say to him: "Well, we can read to ourselves, our use of holy numbers would shock you, and a poet may lament—"where is Telford
whose bridged canals are still a Shropshire glory,
where Muir who on a Douglas spruce rode out a storm and called an earthquake noble,
where Mr. Vynyian Board, thanks to whose lifelong fuss the hunted whale now suffers
a quicker death?'—without being called an idiot, though none of them bore arms or made a public splash," then "Look!" we would point, for a dig at Athens, "Here is the place where we cook."
Though built in Lower Austria, do-it-yourself America prophetically blueprinted this palace kitchen for kingdoms where royalty would be incognito, for an age when
Courtesy might think: "'From your voice and the back of your neck I know we shall get on
but cannot tell from your thumbs who is to give the orders." The right note is harder
to hear than in the Age of Poise when She talked shamelessly to her maid and sang
noble lies with Him, but struck it can be still in New Cnossos where if I am banned by a shrug it is my fault, not Father's, as it is my taste whom I put below the salt.
The prehistoric hearthstone, round as a birthday-button and sacred to Granny, is as old stuff as the bowel-loosening nasal war cry, but this all-electric room
where ghosts would feel uneasy, a witch at a loss, is numinous and again
the center of a dwelling not, as lately it was, an abhorrent dungeon where the warm unlaundered meiny
belched their comic prose and from a dream of which
chaste Milady awoke blushing. House-proud, deploring labor, extolling work, these engines politely insist that banausics can be liberals, a cook a pure artist
who moves everyman - at a deeper level than Mozart, for the subject of the verb to-hunger is never a name: dear Adam and Eve had different bottoms,
but the neotene who marches upright and can subtract reveals a belly
like the serpent's with the same vulnerable look. Jew, Gentile or pigmy,
he must get his calories before he can consider her profile or
his own, attack you or play chess, and take what there is however hard to get down: then surely those in whose creed God is edible may call a fine omelette a Christian deed.
The sin of Gluttony is ranked among the Deadly Seven, but in murder mysteries one can be sure the gourmet didn't do it: children, brave warriors out of a job,