Refrain

HARD ON YOUR RUMP
BUMP BUMP
HARD ON YOUR RUMP
BUMP BUMP

I

O the savage munching of the long dark train crunching up the miles crunching up the long slopes and the hills that crouch and sprawl through the night like animals asleep, gulping the winking towns and the shadow-brimmed valleys where lone trees twist their thorny arms.

The smoke flares red and yellow;
the smoke curls like a long dragon’s tongue
over the broken lands.

The train with teeth flashing
gnaws through the piecrust of hills and plains
greedy of horizons.

Alcazar de San Juan

II
TO R. H.

I invite all the gods to dine on the hard benches of my third class coach that joggles over brown uplands dragged at the end of a rattling train.

I invite all the gods to dine, great gods and small gods, gods of air and earth and sea, and of the grey land where among ghostly rubbish heaps and cast-out things linger the strengthless dead.

I invite all the gods to dine, Jéhovah and Crepitus and Sebek, the slimy crocodile ... But no; wait ... I revoke the invitation.

For I have seen you, crowding gods, hungry gods. You have a drab official look. You have your pockets full of bills, claims for indemnity, for incense unsniffed since men first jumped up in their sleep and drove you out of doors.

Let me instead, O djinn that sows the stars and tunes the strings of the violin, have fifty lyric poets, not pale parson folk, occasional sonneteers, but sturdy fellows who ride dolphins, who need no wine to make them drunk, who do not fear to meet red death at the meanads’ hands or to have their heads at last float vine-crowned on the Thracian sea.

Anacreon, a partridge-wing? A sip of wine, Simonides? Algy has gobbled all the pastry and left none for the Elizabethans who come arm in arm, singing bawdy songs, smelling of sack, from the Mermaid. Ronsard, will you eat nothing, only sniff roses? Those Anthologists have husky appetites! There’s nothing left but a green banana unless that galleon comes from Venily with Hillyer breakfasts wrapped in sonnet-paper.

But they’ve all brought gods with them! Avaunt! Take them away, O djinn that paints the clouds and brings in the night in the rumble and clatter of the train cadences out of the past ... Did you not see how each saved a bit out of the banquet to take home and burn in quiet to his god?

Madrid, Caceres, Portugal

III

Three little harlots with artificial roses in their hair each at a window of a third-class coach on the train from Zafra to the fair.

Too much powder and too much paint shining black hair. One sings to the clatter of wheels a swaying unending song that trails across the crimson slopes and the blue ranks of olives and the green ranks of vines. Three little harlots on the train from Zafra to the fair.

The plowman drops the traces on the shambling oxen’s backs turns his head and stares wistfully after the train.

The mule-boy stops his mules shows his white teeth and shouts a word, then urges dejectedly the mules to the road again.

The stout farmer on his horse straightens his broad felt hat, makes the horse leap, and waves grandiosely after the train.

Is it that the queen Astarte strides across the fallow lands to fertilize the swelling grapes amid shrieking of her corybants?

Too much powder and too much paint shining black hair. Three little harlots on the train from Zafra to the fair.

Sevilla Merida

IV

My desires have gone a-hunting,
circle through the fields and sniff along the hedges,
hounds that have lost the scent.

Outside, behind the white swirling patterns of coalsmoke, hunched fruit-trees slide by slowly pirouetting, and poplars and aspens on tiptoe peer over each other’s shoulders at the long black rattling train; colts sniff and fling their heels in air across the dusty meadows, and the sun now and then looks with vague interest through the clouds at the blonde harvest mottled with poppies, and the Joseph’s cloak of fields, neatly sewn together with hedges, that hides the grisly skeleton of the elemental earth.

My mad desires
circle through the fields and sniff along the hedges,
hounds that have lost the scent.

Misto

V
VIRGEN DE LAS ANGUSTIAS

The street is full of drums and shuffle of slow moving feet. Above the roofs in the shaking towers the bells yawn.

The street is full of drums and shuffle of slow moving feet. The flanks of the houses glow with the warm glow of candles, and above the upturned faces, crowned, robed in a cone-shaped robe of vast dark folds glittering with gold, swaying on the necks of men, swaying with the strong throb of drums, haltingly she advances.

What manner of woman are you, borne in triumph on the necks of men, you who look bitterly at the dead man on your knees, while your foot in an embroidered slipper tramples the new moon?

Haltingly she advances,
swaying above the upturned faces
and the shuffling feet.

In the dark unthought-of years men carried you thus down streets where drums throbbed and torches flared, bore you triumphantly, mourner and queen, followed you with shuffling feet and upturned faces. You it was who sat in the swirl of your robes at the granary door, and brought the orange maize black with mildew or fat with milk, to the harvest: and made the ewes to swell with twin lambs, or bleating, to sicken among the nibbling flock. You wept the dead youth laid lank and white in the empty hut, sat scarring your cheeks with the dark-cowled women. You brought the women safe through the shrieks and the shuddering pain of the birth of a child; and, when the sprouting spring poured fire in the blood of the young men, and made the he-goats dance stiff-legged in the sloping thyme-scented pastures, you were the full-lipped wanton enchantress who led on moonless nights, when it was very dark in the high valleys, the boys from the villages to find the herd-girls among the munching sweet-breathed cattle beside their fires of thyme-sticks, on their soft beds of sweet-fern.

Many names have they called you, Lady of laughing and weeping, shuffling after you, borne on the necks of men down town streets with drums and red torches: dolorous one, weeping the dead youth of the year ever dying, or full-breasted empress of summer, Lady of the Corybants and the headlong routs that maddened with cymbals and shouting the hot nights of amorous languor when the gardens swooned under the scent of jessamine and nard. You were the slim-waisted Lady of Doves, you were Ishtar and Ashtaroth, for whom the Canaanite girls gave up their earrings and anklets and their own slender bodies, you were the dolorous Isis, and Aphrodite. It was you who on the Syrian shore mourned the brown limbs of the boy Adonis. You were the queen of the crescent moon, the Lady of Ephesus, giver of riches, for whom the great temple reeked with burning and spices. And now in the late bitter years, your head is bowed with bitterness; across your knees lies the lank body of the Crucified.

Rockets shriek and roar and burst against the velvet sky; the wind flutters the candle-flames above the long white slanting candles.

Swaying above the upturned faces to the strong throb of drums, borne in triumph on the necks of men, crowned, robed in a cone-shaped robe of vast dark folds glittering with gold haltingly, through the pulsing streets, advances Mary, Virgin of Pain.

Granada

VI
TO R. J.

It would be fun, you said, sitting two years ago at this same table, at this same white marble cafe table, if people only knew what fun it would be to laugh the hatred out of soldiers’ eyes ...

If I drink beer with my enemy, you said, and put your lips to the long glass, and give him what he wants, if he wants it so hard that he would kill me for it, I rather think he’d give it back to me You laughed, and stretched your long legs out across the floor.

I wonder in what mood you died,
out there in that great muddy butcher-shop,
on that meaningless dicing-table of death.

Did you laugh aloud at the futility, and drink death down in a long draught, as you drank your beer two years ago at this same white marble cafe table? Or had the darkness drowned you?

Cafe Oro del Rhin
Plaza de Santa Ana

VII

Down the road against the blue haze that hangs before the great ribbed forms of the mountains people come home from the fields; they pass a moment in relief against the amber frieze of the sunset before turning the bend towards the twinkling smoke-breathing village.

A boy in sandals with brown dusty legs and brown cheeks where the flush of evening has left its stain of wine. A donkey with a jingling bell and ears askew. Old women with water jars of red burnt earth. Men bent double under burdens of faggots that trail behind them the fragrance of scorched uplands. A child tugging at the end of a string a much inflated sow. A slender girl who presses to her breast big bluefrilled cabbages. And a shepherd in the clinging rags of his cloak who walks with lithe unhurried stride behind the crowded backs of his flock.

The road is empty
only the swaying tufts of oliveboughs
against the fading sky.

Down on the steep hillside a man still follows the yoke of lumbering oxen plowing the heavy crimson-stained soil while the chill silver mists steal up about him.

I stand in the empty road and feel in my arms and thighs the strain of his body as he leans far to one side and wrenches the plow from the furrow, feel my blood throb in time to his slow careful steps as he follows the plow in the furrow.

Red earth giver of all things of the yellow grain and the oil and the wine to all gods sacred of the fragrant sticks that crackle in the hearth and the crisp swaying grass that swells to dripping the udders of the cows, of the jessamine the girls stick in their hair when they walk in twos and threes in the moonlight, and of the pallid autumnal crocuses ... are there no fields yet to plow?

Are there no fields yet to plow where with sweat and straining of muscles good things may be wrung from the earth and brown limbs going home tired through the evening?

Lanjaron

VIII

O such a night for scaling garden walls; to push the rose shoots silently aside and pause a moment where the water falls into the fountain, softly troubling the wide bridge of stars tremblingly mirrored there terror-pale and shaking as the real stars shake in crystal fear lest the rustle of silence break with a watchdog’s barking.

O to scale the garden wall and fling my life into the bowl of an adventure, stake on the silver dice the past and future forget the odds and lying in the garden sing in time to the flutter of the waiting stars madness of love for the slender ivory white of her body hidden among dark silks where is languidest the attar weighted air.

To drink in one strong jessamine scented draught
sadness of flesh, twining madness of the night.

O such a night for scaling garden walls; yet I lie alone in my narrow bed and stare at the blank walls, forever afraid, of a watchdog’s barking.

Granada

IX

Rain-swelled the clouds of winter drag themselves like purple swine across the plain. On the trees the leaves hang dripping fast dripping away all the warm glamour all the ceremonial paint of gorgeous bountiful autumn.

The black wet boles are vacant and dead. Among the trampled leaves already mud rot the husks of the rich nuts. On the hills the snow has frozen the last pale crocuses and the winds have robbed the smell of the thyme.

Down the wet streets of the town from doors where the light spills out orange over the shining irregular cobbles and dances in ripples on gurgling gutters; sounds the zambomba.

In the room beside the slanting street round the tray of glowing coals in their stained blue clothes, dusty with the dust of workshops and factories, the men and boys sit quiet; their large hands dangle idly or rest open on their knees and they talk in soft tired voices. Crosslegged in a corner a child with brown hands sounds the zambomba.

Outside down the purple street stopping sometimes at a door, breathing deep the heady wine of sunset, stride with clattering steps those to whom the time will never come of work-stiffened unrestless hands.

The rain-swelled clouds of winter roam
like a herd of swine over the town and the dark plain.

The wineshops full of shuffling and talk, tanned faces
bright eyes, moist lips moulding desires
blow breaths of strong wine in the faces of passers-by.

There are guards in the storehouse doors where are gathered the rich fruits of autumn, the grain the sweet figs and raisins; sullen blood tingling to madness they stride by who have not reaped. Sounds the zambomba.

Albaicin

X

The train throbs doggedly over the gleaming rails fleeing the light-green flanks of hills dappled with alternate shadow of clouds, fleeing the white froth of orchards, of clusters of apples and cherries in flower, fleeing the wide lush meadows, wealthy with cowslips, and the tramping horses and backward-strained bodies of plowmen, fleeing the gleam of the sky in puddles and glittering waters the train throbs doggedly over the ceaseless rails spurning the verdant grace of April’s dainty apparel; so do my desires spurn those things which are behind in hunger of horizons.

Rapido: Valencia Barcelona
1919 1920