Paschal moon: easily reducible adolescences

It’s true that when we hear the words “Poets of World War I”, we typically don’t think of women. Partly, of course, because women were for the most part kept away from the front, so whatever they wrote about was de facto about their life waiting at home. But because that’s how they experienced the war, that perspective is still valid.

In past years I’ve given you examples from Eleanor Farjeon and Anna Akhmatova. Today I’ve got a little something from the poet-painter Mina Loy, born in 1882 in London, resident of most of the artistic centers of Europe before moving to the United States in 1916. Modernism, futurism, Dada, feminism, surrealism, post-modernism, conceptualism—Loy threw herself into all the major movements of the times.

Loy considered herself more a visual artist than a poet, but she knew her way around a page. “The Dead” was written in 1920, and for someone who didn’t have first-hand experience of the war, she certainly captured its aftermath, using all the modernist imagery then available.

“The Dead”

We have flowed out of ourselves  

Beginning on the outside 

That shrivable skin          

Where you leave off        

Of infinite elastic        

Walking the ceiling          

Our eyelashes polish stars            

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle             

Of a descendant

We spit up our passions in our grand-dams            

Fixing the extension of your reactions             

Our shadow lengthens    

In your fear        

You are so old   

Born in our immortality            

Stuck fast as Life             

In one impalpable            

Omniprevalent Dimension             

We are turned inside out 

Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs                     

Street lights footle in our ocular darkness            

Having swallowed your irate hungers             

Satisfied before bread-breaking    

To your dissolution          

We splinter into Wholes          

Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow             

Among the refuse of your unborn centuries            

In our busy ashbins         

Stink the melodies           

Of your         

So easily reducible          

Adolescences    

Our tissue is of that which escapes you             

Birth-Breaths and orgasms           

The shattering tremor of the static        

The far-shore of an instant            

The unsurpassable openness of the circle    

Legerdemain of God       

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums

Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves             

Break on our edgeless contours   

The mouthed echoes of what        

has exuded to our companionship

Is horrible to the ear        

Of the half that is left inside them.