Free Bedouin of the London Evening by Rosemary Tonks Page A

another’s power,
    And the last barriers go down between us….
    More at home in a jazz pit than with you,
    Hotter on the Baltic, when it fries in ice,
    Better understood by cattle, grocers, blocks of wood,
    My refrigerated body feels the coffin’s touch in every word
    You utter, and backs away for ever from your bed.
    You know me far too well, O dustbin of the soul;
    My sex, her nerve completely broken by it, has constructed
    Barriers, thick walls, never to be battered down.
    On the other side (with a last mouthful of the double-dutch to spit!)
    She looks away; and in a wholly opposite direction.

To a Certain Young Man
    (or The Carrier-bag Eros)
    I can hear the Eros of grey rain, Veganin, and telephones
    Inside your voice.
    His wings, once cut out of Greek frost,
    Are now the tint of an old, polished street.
    Softly croaking out clichés, in the narrow passage
    With its gas-pipes and fuse-boxes, he makes us
    Zoophytes – sponging up gravy, nightmares, dullness!
    We fill our veins with soapy water, anxious
    To be good enough…for this latrine whore, Eros.
    Always, Arabia Desetta; the solitary table
    In the restaurant is where we end up,
    At the mercy of a salt and pepper pot.
    Hosanna! I accept, without quibbling, fly-scrawl,
    The carrier-bag of cheap sentences,
    On these terms, unless…there is a way to lower them.
    I accept. For
my
Eros is atrocious….
    If water-clear moonlight and streets
    Sharper than greengages are your drink,
    Drunkard, you can be cured. One wound from Eros
    And your breast can only drink arrows
    With its illiterate and fragrant mud,
    (Teetotaller, dead drunk on your own blood.)
    It’s ludicrous! It’s hopeless.
    Shut up your underworlds! Close your hearts!
    The century is over. Doors are slamming
    In the tragic, casual era. The Eros of dead café tunes
    Is in your voice.…
    He salts and peppers me another pair of arms.

A Few Sentences Away
    What a night! My past is very close.
    Dark rag-and-satin April in the city
    Moves its water-lily breezes, one by one. My fading letters!
    My café-au-lait sentences that groaned for love and money.
    There are nights when…
    Lying an inch or two above the ground inside my head,
    Heavy, but rippling with levitations, philosophy’s
    Bokhara carpet flies my past in and out of Time.
    My past, no older than an April night!
    A few streets away – boulevard scab of a hotel
    She lived in; her armchair voyages inside a bottle;
    Her pride, its great sciatic nerve ready at a word to –
    ……England is darker than a thrush, tonight,
    Brown, trustworthy hours lie ahead. Suddenly
    My past hurls her dream towards me!
    I steady myself:…but how tender, carnal, blasé it is.
    Let me
hide
, well away from a past that dreams
    Like that. Away from streets that taste of blood & sugar
    When the glowing month smashes itself against the hedges
    In the dark. I need ink poured by an abbey;
    For…April, old greengrocer, I throw ahead of me a universe
    Above your dripping clouds in flames, below
    The deep, opulent engorgement of your soul in rut; & so lasting
    Time snatches its hours there, like a poppy, when it can.

Note on
Notes on Cafés and Bed
rooms
    My foremost preoccupation at the moment is the search for an idiom which is individual, contemporary and musical. And one that has sufficient authority to bear the full weight of whatever passion I would wish to lay upon it.
    Every poet who has been confined – at the mercy of form when he has come of age emotionally – and has found half the things he wants to say well out of his poem’s range, knows the immensity of the task. And I am not speaking here of metrical skills, but of absolute freshness and authenticity in handling diction.
    What I write about must develop from my life and times. I am especially conscious of the great natural forces which bring modern life up to date. My concern here is with exact emotional proportions – proportions as they are now current for me. Ideally, whatever is