Free Collected Poems in English and French by Samuel Beckett Page A

Madonna!
    the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey
    charging Pretender.
    That's not moving, that's moving .                                 10

    What's that?
    A little green fry or a mushroomy one?
    Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?
    How long did she womb it, the feathery one?
    Three days and four nights?
    Give it to Gillot.

    Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Red,
    come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi's sun-red
    crystally cloud
    and I'll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones
    or I'll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day.      20
    To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser,
    and not a syllogism out of him
    no more than if Pa were still in it.
    Hey! pass over those coppers,
    sweet millèd sweat of my burning liver!
    Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing
    Jesuits out of the skylight.

    Who's that? Hals?
    Let him wait.

    My squinty doaty!
    I hid and you sook.                                                             30
    And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour
    foetus!

    What an exfoliation!
    Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!
    My one child
    scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood—
    blood!
    Oh Harvey belovèd
    how shall the red and white, the many in the few, (dear bloodswirling Harvey)
    eddy through that cracked beater?                                   40
    And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow.

    What's that?
    How long?
    Sit on it.
    A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
    against the sharp spires of the one
    lady:
    not once or twice but. …
    (Kip of Christ hatch it!)
    in one sun's drowning                                                     50
    (Jesuitasters please copy).
    So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid
    leather—
    what am I saying! the gentle canvas—
    and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,
    and farewell for a space to the yellow key of the
    Rosicrucians.
    They don't know what the master of them that do did,
    that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air,
    and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet,
    and the eyes by its zig-zags.
    So we drink Him and eat Him                                           60
    and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis
    because He can jig
    as near or as far from His Jigging Self
    and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks.
    How's that, Antonio?

    In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.
    Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?

    Anna Maria!
    She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.
    Leider! Leider! she bloomed and withered,                        70
    a pale abusive parakeet in a mainstreet window.
    No I believe every word of it I assure you.
    Fallor, ergo sum!
    The coy old frôleur!
    He tolle'd and legge'd
    and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.
    No matter, let it pass.
    I'm a bold boy I know
    so I'm not my son
    (even if I were a concierge)                                80
    nor Joachim my father's
    but the chip of a perfect block that's neither old nor new,
    the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.

    Are you ripe at last,
    my slim pale double-breasted turd?
    How rich she smells,
    this abortion of a fledgling!
    I will eat it with a fish fork.
    White and yolk and feathers.
    Then I will rise and move moving                        90
    toward Rahab of the snows,
    the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,
    Christina the ripper.
    Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank
    who has climbed the bitter steps,
    (René du Perron… .!)
    and grant me my second
    starless inscrutable hour.
    1930
NOTES
    René Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten