Poetry Explorer- Classic Contemporary Poetry, PRAISES IV: ON THE BEAUTY AND THE WONDERS OF WOMEN, by THOMAS MCGRATH


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Classic and Contemporary Poetry

PRAISES IV: ON THE BEAUTY AND THE WONDERS OF WOMEN, by                     Poet's Biography
First Line: I wake in the early dawn and my hand has fallen asleep
Last Line: "more of these shennhandigans could change the world without
Subject(s): Beauty; Economics; Politics & Government; Sex; Women


I wake in the early dawn and my hand has fallen asleep,
(Bedded between her legs in the nest of her sex)
And is dreaming it is a bird -- my left and dreaming hand.
And the birds begin: footnoting the long paragraphs of the light
That are daybreak -- birds she will scold for presumption when she awakes.
I move my hand. She whimpers. But her own dream still holds.
I drag this dream-hand into my life...

Suddenly Spring
Fills all the house, the county --
maybe the whole world --
With the odor of orchards, gardens, orange blossoms, attars,
Essences: musk, civet, ambergris, frangipani,
Emanations, effluvia, eidolons -- volatile oils sweeter
Than all the perfumes of Araby assault my sense and my soul!

My god, I must be Huysmans! -- I think I've invented his scent
Organ -- or at least harmonium. Next thing I know I'll be writing
Au Rebours, sparking the Goncourts or Remy Gourmand or Gourmet!
And it's Guermantes all the way in this swan-like or Proustian light.

But it's not that. It's just ("just" think of it! -- "just"!) --
My hand which has come from between her legs where her cunt and my spunk
In the dialectic of essences formed this sacred fragrance
All else sublimed away...
And now it's loose in the world!
Like the hand of a prophet!

And what will the neighbors say?
Oh, I hear them
Groan and laugh in their sleep and the street has both ends flapping
Like an oversized wig on a windy day as a most un-Lutheran lust
Is loosed in the glacial bedrooms of the sensible petty bourgeois!
They'll be coming to get us, girl! How can you sleep and slumber?
Fuck off, care-charmer sleep, thou son of the sable night!

But that's an alarmist thought -- time now for Irish cunning...
What can I do to save this taboo hieratic hand?
It can't, in the back garden, like a dog's bone be buried,
And it's not the kind of a thing you can take to your local bank --
Considering the box it came from no safety deposit system
Will hold this myrrh and frankincense -- the Three Wisemen
Would arrive early this year and stick up the dismal joint!
And all the investors would come, and anyone with a loose dime
Would start an account -- and they'd all, by god, live there
Eating from the giveaway pots and pans burning the tellers for fuel!

What a scandal! Copulating among mortgages
And second mortgages: everyone: getting off on the scent.
And they'll call in the Federal Reserve and the National Guard and Oh god! --
Annuit Coeptis ...
End of the world as we know it.
And all for a hand!
Perhaps a secret account in Switzerland....
But then the dollar
Would fall and the whole slave world would have to live on the yen
This hand produces without even lifting a finger.

It is not an easy problem to solve -- what to do with this hand.
It has never been faced before by another living man...
Perhaps by sleight-of-hand I can charm it away?
Or demount it?
Then, like a pressed flower, I could fold it up in a book.
Little five-leaf clover from the world's ten fateful fields,
Spade-handed ugly peasant appendage that she has made perfect...

Excellent! Excellent ... But what book will I choose?
Marx's Capital comes to mind ... safe from the liberals
And all econ professors -- but what of the Thought Police?
Their sacred quest for the Word ... anything underlined?
So maybe the bible -- one of the lagered and barbwire books
All don'ts and do's, the Angel in irons, Mr. Moses Moreso.
But this hand would confound all law: theologic, economic and bourgeois.
And just as I insert it (where meat is forbidden) it jumps
Into Apocalypse! Turns to a burning bush and sends
Bluebirds of purest flame to aid the World Revolution!

Envoi

Comrades, if we had more of these hands we could make love, not war.
And neighbors: more of these shennhandigans could change the world without
arms!


Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, P.O. Box 271, Port Townsend, WA
98368-0271, www.cc.press.org




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