Читать книгу Introducing Irony: A Book of Poetic Short Stories and Poems - Maxwell Bodenheim - Страница 9

THE SCRUB-WOMAN

Table of Contents

(A Sentimental Poem)

TIME has placed his careful insult

Upon your body.

In other ages Time gave rags

To hags without riches, but now he brings

Cotton, calico, and muslin—

Tokens of his admiration

For broken backs.

Neat nonsense, stamped with checks and stripes,

Fondles the deeply marked sneer

That Time has dropped upon you.

While Time, in one of his well-debated moods

That men call an age, is attending to his manners,

I shall scan the invisible banners

Of meaning that unfurl when you move.

II

Table of Contents

WHEN you open your mouths

I see a well, and strangled chastity

At the bottom—not chastity

Of the flesh, but lucid purity

Of the mind choked by a design

Of filth that has slowly turned cold,

Like a sewer intruding

Upon a small, dead face.

This is not repulsive.

Only things alive, with gaudy hollows,

Can repulse, but your death holds

A haggard candour that gently thrusts its way

Into the unimportance of facts.

You are not old: you were never young.

Life caressed your senses

With a heavy sterility,

And you thanked him with the remnant

Of thought that he left behind—

His usual moment of absentminded kindness.

When the muscles of your arm

Punish the brush that rubs upon wood

I see a rollicking mockery—

Rhythm in starved pursuit

Of petrified desire.

When the palms of your hands

Stay flat in dirty water

I can observe your emotions

Welcome refuse as perfume,

Intent upon a last ghastly deception.

When you grunt and touch your hair

I perceive your exhaustion

Reaching for a bit of pity

And carefully rearranging it.

Lift up your pails and go home;

Take the false tenderness of rest;

Drop your clothes, disordered, on the floor.

Vindictive simplicity.