Unpublished poems and fragments from the first typescript:
Benedictions
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Two typescript pages, letter format. Undated. One correction campaign (black ink); vertical lead pencil marking in front of the first four stanzas of part 4. |
 Page 1 |
 Page 2 |
| Benedictions |
| 1. Foaming Starts |
| "Seems they was all out of hyena-vomit | |||
| Up to the library, Sarge." A true laugh in |  | ||
| Eviscerated this retort, all that remained of gin on a summer washday. | |
| And yet hyena-vomit hors-d'oeuvres would be served later | | ||
| In the shade of the fir-trees | | ||
| And ice-cubes clink in the tall frost glasses. | |
| As though all [Turkish or oriental] rugs were merely a [new] way | | ||
| Of walking, a kind of glorified place to put your feet | |||
| And these affairs merely occasions to sit together or speak. |
| 2. Where the Annointing Happened |
| In the past year only two of our tribe | |||
| Have scuXXX succombed to the pernicious effects of pleasure, | | ||
| And these, like mountains veiled by water or the sky | |||
| On the wall of some Italian restaurant | |||
| Or close to the sea, where slow boats come and go. | |||
| The hours undo their pack, unsweetened by dust and fatigue | |||
| As one prowls among shipyards, hopeless of a design | |||
| Which faints at the border of intuition carried to new and sunless heights. | |||
| A kind of monsoon is watching over Hawaii | |||
| In the restaurant mural in my dream. |
| 3. |
| On the way out from your walk | |||
| You beheld the little girl with the bottle of lemon soda | |||
| And the photographs of the way things were before they were the way they are now. | | ||
| Sullen, and concealing half of the photographs | |||
| In a black woollen coat, out of keeping with the bright day. |
| breast | | ||
| The sun has warmed your fingers,they creep swollenly toward your pocketXXXXXX breast. | | ||
| This is the day they said, that the man sets sail | | ||
| Like the landscape in your pocket | |||
| Turning in from the too-dark day. |
| (Benedictions) |
| 4. The Brainstorm |
| We put everything in order, | |||
| A museum of thought was the result. |
| The page ended just at the burnt edge, | |||
| The reader's puckered lips. He is looking for "milk" |
| In the directory, but this volume ends with the "MI"'s. | |||
| Another time will do as well, at school last year |
| Or elsewhere, in praise of bushes | |||
| Or wandering. Everywhere, "D.E.L.I.G.H.T." |
| Is pinned up; loquacious, others | |||
| Block the entrance; it had been taken down and put up again. |
| 5, Epilogue (written later) |
| Intrigued, I pressed for details. It seemed the carbuncle really had existed, not later, as I had thought, but at a considerably earlier period--say about the 6th century B.C. If my calculations were right, the bottle of windeXXXXX wine we had sampled must have been of that era--it had a sandy taste, like blood on stone. As for Rufus, there seemed no earthly reason why he should be detained any longer, and accordingly he was let go. | | ||
| But one week later a curious thing happened, which I like to think of as a kind of epilogue to all this. Walking near the canal one night, I was startled to hear a man's voice in the darkness ahead of me. I summoned him to halt. To my endless surprise, Rufus' tow head emerged out of the shadows. Questioned, he said that he had been looking for the length of lead pipe that which had disappeared so mysteriously from the principal's office, that he was positive it had been dropped there. | | ||
| Sure enough, a few days later it was discovered by a member of the local gendarmerie, half imbedded in the sticky ooze and small white pebbles of the canal, casting unintentional blinding shimmers as he bent to pick it up. |
