Bedouin of the London Evening

by Rosemary Tonks

  And odorous with water. When there’s less time

  (My life, my work, my hopes!) every step leads to an assignation.

  It’s the élan of café life on a hot night,

  The street that’s full of modern love-talk, like a room,

  It’s the jade-breath of the waterjar…that is mortality

  For the blood that is too insolent for work.

  Hypnos and Warm Winters

  Europe is all steam and leaves and love-affairs!

  Old streets – they’re bathrooms of steam and water

  Where Hypnos follows me all day in a silk dressing-gown,

  Like two old bores we move through the great months of rain.

  Suppose I’m coming from my love-affair…

  While the steam-heated rain pours down,

  And yawning takes the wax and starch out of my skin,

  It’s the last straw having to describe the night

  Again in detail to my heart – as if it wasn’t there,

  When Hypnos, like a twentieth-century bachelor

  Bored easily, is lying full length on my bed

  – With the effrontery to add to his art the spice

  Of fanning me to sleep – with sheets of my own verse.

  Escape!

  It is among the bins and dormitories of cities

  Where the busker wins his bread

  By turning music on a spit, and the heavens

  Have the dirt of the great sty upon their sides,

  That one goes to gormandise upon Escape!

  Where alleys are so narrow that the Fates

  Like meatporters can scarcely pass

  With their awkward burden in its muslin bandages,

  And carry off the rabble safely to their graves;

  Where every shadow opens a bordel

  At sunset, as decay moves

  Into cloakrooms of blue velvet in red cheese;

  These are the last of the great kitchens!

  And your soul knows half the flavour

  Lies underfoot in dirty flagstones,

  When like a chef it makes a point of bringing in

  To show before you dine – Escape,

  Still active in a net,

  Auroras, icy champagnes upon its wings!

  Story of a Hotel Room

  Thinking we were safe – insanity!

  We went in to make love. All the same

  Idiots to trust the little hotel bedroom.

  Then in the gloom…

  …And who does not know that pair of shutters

  With the awkward hook on them

  All screeching whispers? Very well then, in the gloom

  We set about acquiring one another

  Urgently! But on a temporary basis

  Only as guests – just guests of one another’s senses.

  But idiots to feel so safe you hold back nothing

  Because the bed of cold, electric linen

  Happens to be illicit….

  To make love as well as that is ruinous.

  Londoner, Parisian, someone should have warned us

  That without permanent intentions

  You have absolutely no protection

  – If the act is clean, authentic, sumptuous,

  The concurring deep love of the heart

  Follows the naked work, profoundly moved by it.

  Bedouin of the London Evening

  Ten years in your cafés and your bedrooms

  Great city, filled with wind and dust!

  Bedouin of the London evening,

  On the way to a restaurant my youth was lost.

  And like a medium who falls into a trance

  So deep, she can be scratched to death

  By her Familiar – at its leisure!

  I have lain rotting in a dressing-gown

  While being savaged (horribly) by wasted youth.

  I have been young too long, and in a dressing-gown

  My private modern life has gone to waste.

  Boy in the Lane

  in search of origin

  This lane at zenith; when its hair is warm.

  Here’s the magician with his Pedigree of Snouts

  Whose ransack shimmers after him.

  And here’s the lair in music trousseau where his lout’s

  Foot beat out a bright bed. The Atlas stuffs his shoes

  With tussore. A dark animal

  Pulls August out of the hedge, the linctus dropping as it chews,

  Eyes him with the clear gog of Lucifer, the edible

  Hot silk of the dream pasture in its mouth.

  Geography lays eggs and pearls.

  Thirst! And the ceiling advances with luminous hulls.

  Panes of weather are left flashing in the path;

  Quagmarks of angels in the mud,

  The blue thrash of the Jesus fairy. And the youth

  Detonates this spoor to drive the Magnifico in thud

  And glare of blades against his ear;

  The heavenly quops vamped by the tender oilskin of the drum!

  His breast reports the code, as a snake dines off some rare

  Tattoo its literate satin muscle cannot name.

  Archbrute of quadrillion Kingbeats!

  But the north flies a magnetic blue roan cloud

  Whose touchwaters on the scented dirt of the sphere

  Set – in jay’s wing fathoms. And Mud

  Looks up through this aquarium of rain, from her

  Queasy seance under the grope of the great knotted lips

  Of riverpike, whose tarnished flesh

  Drinks the umber hangings of the bottom. This boy who clips

  Himself a Dynasty of Wings – is hers! Hers to the ghost rash

  On his lily-clapping vellum, that strokes her lie to death.

  Fog Peacocks

  We were the city’s young, and our veins

  If they ran pale from the bad food

  Even so they carried the infernos of its moods,

  For we were the children of the rotting peacock

  Of a passer-by, seen in a mist of scorching bitumen.

  Oh you bound homeward when the cloud

  Of gold gas shone behind the house,

  With a captured insect, once half Helium

  Now only spurs and gauze,

  And the green liquor pool in jars of glass…

  We were not less whose city like an alcohol

  Spoke hotly to the artery; and we already

  Knew love’s streets – where at the fall

  Of thermal, phosphorescent dusk

  There is a drop that goes down sheer to Hell.

  Those evenings you were mutinous

  Against the tyranny of kitchen tables where

  The flat iron cools its mirror of blue ore

  And grip of hot rag,

  And the old blanket smokes like humus,

  We were the young, derisive metropolitans

  Soon to be mashed flat as a wet coalsack by skies

  Of ochre, full of malice, coating the trees with emulsion,

  And you would have to drag for our disgust in sewers,

  And break the cobwebs reaching an illusion.

  Poet as Gambler

  Now like a gambler on an errand

  Of my wasted youth, when gutter and heavens

  Were my lottery, and my estate

  A shirt of water-lotus that the night wind

  Loved to rock as I went to do my gambling

  Alone at dusk in the dark city

  To out-bid Eternity – with nothing

  But a blouse of lilies flooding my lapel

  A wallet stuffed with fever for my stake,

  All night until the early hours when stowaways

  Will grope for the unknown and illustrate

  Their clothes with lustrous bruises as they go aboard

  And all the ropes and fabrics of a boat

  Are heavy with cold nectars in the dawn,

  Creation, glimmering and surly underfoot,
<
br />   And Egypt drowsy on a cake of opium,

  I went with nothing but the shirt upon my back

  To cast lots with the Infinite,

  And my bid was the blouse that rocks

  On gamblers with a linen sail all night.

  Apprentice

  to the lane, the zephyr, and the east.

  There is no scholarship to lane and zephyr

  Like a boorish, pampered youth!

  I have no documents to hawk – sinner and loafer

  In the airy darkness – but on a London night

  When boats lie up with jewelled nostrils, and under

  Sheets of dust and satin, water is in slumber,

  Inquire of my ability to be last off the streets

  When I am molten, stupid, dangerous,

  Under an alley’s aspic wall with bullying confederates

  In arms, love, lies, and law-breakings.

  And for my knowledge of the dawn

  Examine me upon the solitary power-drunk return

  From the nocturnal city; walking when the world

  Is marvellous, upon a country road

  My boot – that’s plump with mildew and uncorseted –

  The first to tread the lane when it is dug out

  Fresh and dripping from the ether, and the spade

  Laid by – heavenly crust still luminous upon it!

  Delinquent! with bedlam’s pulses sobbing in my limbs

  And tomorrow – all gold bruises

  On the rise! Test me (while I am fresh from sins

  And villainy) upon the conduct of the zephyr

  At the hour he leaves the atmosphere to join the finches

  In the path, and wash his fresh wings in the dust.

  You, who would tame with toolbag or certificate

  My shudder…as the east

  Drinks diamonds, and the world’s born blazing underfoot!

  Surgeon and robber learn their touch in the great city,

  But I am after heavenly spoil, and it is

  As a gloveless trespasser that I desire supremacy.

  Blouson Noir

  And the revolutionary – half-drugged by the wet trees

  In Paris in low spirits moves on

  Through the scent-kilns full of gnats

  He’ll be ruined – his throat rots with happiness.

  They’re dirty like a lodging-house, the waterfronts,

  But the dust is seductive to him

  The jasmine atmosphere and hot drip of the thunder

  That crushes Paris bone by bone.

  Zut! He can hear modern life going on!

  Who lives off the sight of a Paris street!

  Down here, it’s dark as a medicine,

  It’s April – everything anointed and caked.

  And his malaise is fabulous.…

  The dirt beds of the trees and the hot dust!

  It’s lethal to patrol here, brainsick and odious,

  On the alluring quays he’s rotten with happiness.

  Bedouin of the London Morning

  We come into the café at dawn,

  There are waterfogs, and civilisation is white

  …if you knew the exotic disgust that grips me

  After another bestial night

  As we come in, broken; dark with inks and dusts and gases

  Like those whose private apartment is the street.

  After an all-night conversation

  When the street-wind hangs on snarling to your coat,

  If you knew my (half erotic) convulsion of loathing

  For the night. (I’m like a sleeper

  When his mouth is stopped up

  By some terrible mud-crust the dream has crammed there

  And the soul goes pressing up against

  Trying to scream with hydrophobia – and can only murmur.

  Some love-thought turns his mouth to blood with longing

  Only a moment later.) In the workman’s café

  If you knew the almost voluptuous sense of frustration

  When you’re broken… And the morning’s alcoholic as a lily.

  April and the Ideas-Merchant

  I was plying my trade in the street,

  It was a rainy agate twilight

  And my eyes were half lid…but my town-bred soul

  Was tempted and within an inch of giving in.

  I was at work upon a suburb of my brain,

  An ultra-treacherous idea was in its private room there

  And I was closing in – with the ink streaming off my brow!

  But my soul attentive to the agate oxygen.

  Crates of glass and water had been dumped down by the weather,

  Overhead a last skylight opened in the Koh-i-noor

  – A whole civilisation was loose, bully and vixen

  Moving along, roasting hot, ready for anything!

  And – odium – I was in the chien-loup

  Of the Latin Quarter of my brain

  Where certain dark yellow hours go by

  …that lead off surreptitiously into eternity.

  Academic! Hack! Vulgarian!

  You mistook the nature of your calling. Poets are only at work,

  With an agate daylight going through the street,

  When they live, dream, bleed – within an inch of giving in to art.

  On the advantage of being ill-treated by the World

  I have a quarrel with the world

  At music in my breast

  To walk the shabby thrilling twilight of the street

  And to be stewed in fogs that stick

  To me, as a tramp’s nest

  All lice and dews, sticks to his clothes…

  Rouses my soul to beat the velvet sinews

  Of her thickets! To bear

  Old toothmarks bitten deep into my side

  Where January can always fit his blade

  And halve me with the saw

  Again, like sorcerers, while living…

  Goads my invisible to cuff her instrument

  My breast! To stoop and grow

  Hard callouses where the black weather

  Rests its knuckles on me like a sulky Pasha

  Upon the brow

  Of his pet slave, grating magnificent rings…

  Makes my tenant thunder my complaint

  Upon her velvet ropes!

  And yet…as powerful but indolent composers

  Will only work when bailiffs pound their doors,

  Where my musician lodges

  I need Adversity to break its claws!

  Iliad of Broken Sentences

  (1967)

  Since the publication of Notes on Cafés and Bedrooms Rosemary Tonks has moved steadily forward in her search for a diction which allows the material objects, the sensibility, and the humour of today to be incorporated naturally inside the framework of a visionary modern lyric. Her poetry has a dramatic but spontaneous texture, enabling it to carry vast and timeless themes lightly within it; and by qualifying and nourishing these themes with contemporary experience she gains for them new emotional, visual, and moral dimensions. The deserts of the Middle-East are again equated with city life; and this is a handbook to its sofas, hotel corridors, cinemas, underworlds, cardboard suitcases, self-willed buses, banknotes, soapy bathrooms, pork-filled newspapers – and to its anguish, its enraged excitement, its great lonely joys.

  Jacket note, Iliad of Broken Sentences (The Bodley Head, 1967)

  The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas

  I have lived it, and lived it,

  My nervous, luxury civilisation,

  My sugar-loving nerves have battered me to pieces.

  …Their idea of literature is hopeless.

  Make them drink their own poetry!

  Let them eat their gross novel, full of mud.

  It’s quiet; just the fresh, chilly weather…and he

  Gets up from his dead bedroom, and comes in here

  And digs himself into the sofa.

  He stays there up to two
hours in the hole – and talks

  – Straight into the large subjects, he faces up to everything

  It’s……damnably depressing.

  (That great lavatory coat…the cigarillo burning

  In the little dish… And when he calls out: ‘Ha!’

  Madness! – you no longer possess your own furniture.)

  On my bad days (and I’m being broken

  At this very moment) I speak of my ambitions…and he

  Becomes intensely gloomy, with the look of something jugged,

  Morose, sour, mouldering away, with lockjaw.…

  I grow coarser; and more modern (I, who am driven mad

  By my ideas; who go nowhere;

  Who dare not leave my frontdoor, lest an idea…)

  All right. I admit everything, everything!

  Oh yes, the opera (Ah, but the cinema)

  He particularly enjoys it, enjoys it horribly, when someone’s ill

  At the last minute; and they specially fly in

  A new, gigantic, Dutch soprano. He wants to help her

  With her arias. Old goat! Blasphemer!

  He wants to help her with her arias!

  No, I…go to the cinema,

  I particularly like it when the fog is thick, the street

  Is like a hole in an old coat, and the light is brown as laudanum.

  …the fogs! the fogs! The cinemas

  Where the criminal shadow-literature flickers over our faces,