I LOVE you, rotten,
Delicious
rottenness.
I love to suck you out from your
skins
So brown and
soft and coming suave,
So morbid, as the Italians
say.
What a rare, powerful, reminiscent
flavour
Comes out of
your falling through the stages of decay:
Stream within
stream.
Something of the same flavour as
Syracusan muscat wine
Or vulgar Marsala.
Though even the word Marsala will
smack of preciosity
Soon in the pussy-foot West.
What is it?
What is it, in the grape
turning raisin,
In
the medlar, in the sorb-apple.
Wineskins of brown morbidity,
Autumnal
excrementa;
What is
it that reminds us of white gods?
Gods nude as blanched
nut-kernels.
Strangely, half-sinisterly flesh-fragrant
As if with sweat,
And drenched with
mystery.
Sorb-apples, medlars with dead crowns.
I say, wonderful are the hellish
experiences
Orphic,
delicate
Dionysos of
the Underworld.
A kiss, and a vivid spasm of
farewell, a moment’s orgasm
of
rupture.
Then along
the damp road alone, till the next turning.
And there, a new partner, a new
parting, a new unfusing
into
twain,
A new gasp of
further isolation,
A
new intoxication of loneliness, among decaying,
frost-cold
leaves.
Going down the strange lanes of
hell, more and more
intensely alone,
The fibres of the heart parting
one after the other
And yet the soul continuing, naked-footed, ever more
vividly
embodied
Like a flame blown whiter and whiter
In a deeper and deeper
darkness
Ever more
exquisite, distilled in separation.
So, in the strange retorts of
medlars and sorb-apples
The distilled essence of hell.
The exquisite odour of
leave-taking.
Jamque
vale!
Orpheus, and the winding, leaf-clogged, silent lanes of
hell.
Each soul departing with its own
isolation,
Strangest
of all strange companions,
And best.
Medlars, sorb-apples
More than sweet
Flux of autumn
Sucked out of your empty
bladders
And sipped
down, perhaps, with a sip of Marsala
So that the rambling, sky-dropped grape can add
its
music to yours,
Orphic farewell, and farewell,
and farewell
And the
ego sum of Dionysos
The sono
io of perfect drunkenness
Intoxication of final
loneliness.
San Gervasio.