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Mina Loy


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Highlands, NC: Jonathan Williams (Jargon Society), 1958.



Lunar Baedeker

A silver Lucifer 

serves 
cocaine in cornucopia 

To some somnambulists 
of adolescent thighs 
draped 
in satirical draperies 

Peris in livery 
prepare 
Lethe 
for posthumous parvenues 

Delirious Avenues 
lit 
with the chandelier souls 
of infusoria 
from Pharoah's tombstones 

lead 
to mercurial doomsdays 
Odious oasis 
in furrowed phosphorous--- 

the eye-white sky-light 
white-light district 
of lunar lusts 

---Stellectric signs 
"Wing shows on Starway" 
"Zodiac carrousel" 

Cyclones 
of ecstatic dust 
and ashes whirl 
crusaders 
from hallucinatory citadels 
of shattered glass 
into evacuate craters 

A flock of dreams 
browse on Necropolis 

From the shores 
of oval oceans 
in the oxidized Orient 

Onyx-eyed Odalisques 
and ornithologists 
observe 
the flight 
of Eros obsolete 

And "Immortality" 
mildews... 
in the museums of the moon 

"Nocturnal cyclops" 
"Crystal concubine" 
------- 
Pocked with personification 
the fossil virgin of the skies 
waxes and wanes----

John Ashbery

  The New Spirit (excerpt) I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave a...