Mina Loy

 

Mina Loy


Joyce's Ulysses


The Normal Monster
sings in the Green Sahara
 
The voice and offal
of the image of God
 
make Celtic noises
in these lyrical hells
 
Hurricanes
of reasoned musics
reap the uncensored earth
 
The loquent consciousness
of living things
pours in torrential languages
 
The elderly colloquists
the Spirit and the Flesh
are out of tongue
 
The Spirit
is impaled upon the phallus
 
Phoenix
of Irish fires
lighten the Occident
 
with Ireland's wings
flap pandemoniums
of Olympian prose
 
and satinize
the imperial Rose
of Gaelic perfumes —
England
the sadistic mother
embraces Erin
 
Master
of meteoric idiom
present
 
The word made flesh
and feeding upon itself
with erudite fangs
The sanguine
introspection of the womb
 
Don Juan
of Judea
upon a pilgrimage
to the Libido
 
The press
purring
its lullabies to sanity
 
Christ capitalized
scourging
incontrite usurers of destiny
in hole and corner temples
 
And hang
The soul's advertisements
outside the ecclesiast's Zoo
 
A gravid day
spawns
gutteral gargoyles
upon the Tower of Babel
 
Empyrean emporium
where the
rejector-recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub rosa
 


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...